The Man From Beijing (42 page)

Mao again. It was as if his face were beaming out there in the darkness. He knew what would happen, she thought. The future is never assured, once and for all. He repeated that wisdom, over and over again, but we didn’t listen. New groups would always emerge and seize privileges for themselves, new revolutions would constantly take place.

She sat on the veranda and let her thoughts come and go. Dozed off. She was woken by a noise. She listened. There it was again. Somebody was knocking on her door. She checked her watch. Midnight. Who would want to visit her this late? She wondered whether she should open the door. There was another knock. Somebody knows that I’m awake, she thought; somebody has seen me on the veranda. She went inside and peered through the peephole. An African was standing outside. He was wearing the hotel uniform. Curiosity got the better of her and she opened the door. The young man handed over a letter. She could see from her name on the envelope that it was Ya Ru’s handwriting. She gave the boy a few Zimbabwe dollars, unsure if it was too much or too little, and went back to the veranda. She read the short message.

She checked the text carefully, as if she expected to find a hidden message between the lines. She found none, nor could she fathom why he had sent her this message in the middle of the night.

She gazed out into the darkness and thought about the predators who have their prey in their sight, without the victims having the slightest idea of what is about to happen.

‘I can see you,’ she whispered. ‘No matter where you come from, I shall discover you in time. Never again will you be able to sit down beside me without my having seen you coming.’

Hong Qiu woke up early the next morning. She had slept fitfully, dreaming about shadows creeping up on her, menacing, faceless. Now she was on the veranda, watching the brief African dawn, the sun rising over the endless bush. A colourful kingfisher with its long beak landed on the veranda rail, then flew off immediately. The dew from the damp night glittered in the grass. From somewhere in the distance came African voices, somebody shouting, laughing. She was surrounded by strong aromas. She thought about the letter that had reached her in the middle of the night and urged herself to be alert. She somehow felt even more wary of Ya Ru in this foreign country.

At eight o’clock a specially selected group of delegates, headed by a trade minister and the mayors of Shanghai and Beijing, had gathered in a conference room off the hotel foyer. Mugabe’s face looked down from several walls with a smile that Hong Qiu couldn’t quite place: Was it friendly or scornful? In a loud voice the trade minister’s state secretary called the assembly to attention.

‘We shall now meet President Mugabe. The president will receive us in his palace. We shall enter in a single file, the usual distance between ministers and mayors and other delegates. We shall greet one another, listen to our national anthems, then sit down at a table in assigned seats. President Mugabe and our ministers will exchange greetings via interpreters, after which President Mugabe will deliver a short speech. We have not been given an advance copy. It could be anything from twenty minutes to three hours. Advance visits to the toilets are strongly advised. The speech will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Those of you who have been given prepared questions will raise your hands, introduce yourselves when called to speak and remain standing while President Mugabe answers. No follow-up questions are allowed, nor is anybody else in the delegation permitted to speak. After the meeting with the president, most of the delegation will visit a copper mine called Wandlana while the minister and selected delegates will continue their discussion with President Mugabe and an unknown number of his ministers.’

Hong Qiu looked at Ya Ru, who was leaning with half-closed eyes against a column at the back of the conference room. It was only when they left the room that they established eye contact. Ya Ru smiled at her before clambering into one of the cars intended for ministers, mayors and specially selected delegates. Hong Qiu sat down in one of the buses waiting outside the hotel.

Her apprehension was growing all the time. I must speak to somebody, she thought, somebody who will understand my fear. She looked around the bus. She had known many of the older delegates for a long time. Most of them shared her view of political developments in China. But they are tired, she thought. They are now so old that they no longer react when danger threatens.

She continued searching, but in vain. There was nobody there she felt she could confide in. After the meeting with President Mugabe she would work once more through the whole list of participants. Surely there must be someone whom she could trust.

The bus headed for Harare at high speed. Through the window Hong Qiu could see the red soil stirred up by the people walking by the side of the road.

The bus suddenly stopped. A man sitting on the other side of the aisle explained to her.

‘We can’t all arrive at the same time,’ he said. ‘The cars with the most important people must arrive first. Then we will arrive, the political and economic ballet to make up the pretty background.’

Hong Qiu smiled. She had forgotten the name of the man who had spoken, but she knew that during the Cultural Revolution he had been a hard-pressed professor of physics. When he returned from his many privations in the country, he had immediately been put in charge of what was to become China’s space research institute. Hong Qiu suspected that he shared her views about the direction China ought to be taking. He was one of the old school still managing to keep going, not one of the youngsters who have never understood what it means to live a life in which something is more important than they are.

They had stopped close to a little marketplace running along both sides of the road. Hong Qiu knew that Zimbabwe was close to economic collapse. That was one of the reasons that their large delegation was visiting the country. Although this would never be made public, it was in fact President Mugabe who had begged the Chinese government to make a contribution towards helping Zimbabwe out of the country’s severe economic depression. The sanctions imposed by the West meant that the basic infrastructure of the country was close to collapse. Only a few days before leaving Beijing, Hong Qiu had read in a newspaper that inflation in Zimbabwe was now approaching 5,000 per cent. People tramping along by the edge of the road were moving very slowly. It seemed to Hong Qiu that they were either hungry or tired.

Hong Qiu suddenly noticed a woman kneeling down. She had a child in a carrier on her back and a head ring made from folded cloth for supporting heavy loads. Two men by her side helped each other to lift up a heavy sack of cement and balance it on her head. Then they helped her to stand up. Hong Qiu watched her stagger away. Without a second thought she stood up, hurried down the aisle and spoke to the interpreter.

‘Please come with me.’

The interpreter, who was a young woman, opened her mouth to protest, but Hong Qiu prevented her from speaking. The driver had opened the front door to allow a flow of air into the bus, which had already started to become stuffy, as the air conditioning wasn’t working. Hong Qiu dragged along the interpreter to the other side of the road where the two men had settled down in the shade and were sharing a cigarette. The woman with the heavy burden on her head had already disappeared into the haze.

‘Find out how much the sack they put on the woman’s head weighs.’

‘About fifty kilos,’ the interpreter informed her after asking.

‘But that’s a horrific burden. Her back will be ruined before she’s thirty.’

The men merely laughed.

‘We’re proud of our women. They’re very strong.’

Hong Qiu could see in their eyes that they didn’t understand what the problem was. Women here suffer the same difficulties that our poor Chinese peasants have to put up with, she thought. Women always carry heavy burdens on their heads, but even worse are the burdens they have to bear inside their heads.

She returned to the bus with the interpreter. Shortly afterwards they set off – now they had an escort of motorcycles. Hong Qiu let the wind from the open window blow into her face.

She would not forget the woman with the sack of cement on her head.

The meeting with President Robert Mugabe lasted four hours. When he came into the room he looked more like a friendly schoolmaster than anything else. When he shook hands with her he was looking beyond her, a man in another world who just brushed against her in passing. After the meeting he would have no memory of her. She knew that this little man, who radiated strength despite being both old and frail, was described by some as a bloodthirsty tyrant who tormented his own people by destroying their homes and chasing them off their land whenever it suited him. But others regarded him as a hero who never gave up the fight against the remnants of colonial power he stubbornly insisted lay behind all of Zimbabwe’s problems.

What did she think herself? She knew too little about the politics to be able to form a definite opinion, but Robert Mugabe was a man who in many ways deserved her admiration and respect. Even if not everything he did was good, he was basically convinced that the roots of colonialism grew very deep and needed to be cut away not just once but many times. Not least of the reasons she respected him was she had read how he was constantly and brutally attacked in the Western media. Hong Qiu had lived long enough to know that loud protests from landowners and their newspapers were often intended to drown the cries of pain coming from those who were still suffering from torture inflicted by colonialism.

Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe were under siege. The West’s indignation had been extreme when, a few years previously, Mugabe had forcibly annexed land owned by the white farmers who still dominated the country and made hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans landless. The hatred of Mugabe increased for every white farmer who, in open confrontation with the landless blacks, was injured by rocks or bullets.

But Hong Qiu knew that as early as 1980, when Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, was liberated from Ian Smith’s fascist regime, Mugabe had offered the white farmers open discussions aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the vital question of landownership. His overtures had been greeted by silence on that first occasion and then many more times over the following fifteen years. Over and over again Mugabe had repeated his offer of negotiations but had received no response, only contemptuous silence. His patience had finally run out, and large numbers of farms were handed over to the landless. This was immediately condemned by the West and protests flowed in from all sides.

At that moment the image of Mugabe was changed from that of a freedom fighter to that of the classical African tyrant. He was depicted just as anti-Semites used to depict the Jews, and this man who had spearheaded the liberation of his country was ruthlessly defamed. Nobody mentioned that the former leaders of the Ian Smith regime, not least Smith himself, had been allowed to remain in Zimbabwe. Mugabe did not send them into the law courts and then to the gallows as the British used to do with rebellious black men in the colonies. But a refractory white man was not the same as a refractory black man.

She listened to Mugabe’s speech. He spoke slowly, his voice was mild, he never raised it even when talking about the sanctions that led to an increase in the infant mortality rate, widespread starvation, and more and more illegal immigration to South Africa alongside millions of others. Mugabe spoke about the opposition in Zimbabwe. ‘There have been incidents,’ Mugabe admitted. ‘But the foreign media never reports the attacks on those loyal to me and the party. We are always the ones who throw stones or make baton charges, but the others never throw firebombs, never maim or beat up their opponents.’

Mugabe spoke for a long time, but he spoke well. Hong Qiu reminded herself that this man was more than eighty years old. Like so many other African leaders he had spent a long time in jail during the drawn-out years when the colonial powers still believed they would be able to face down attacks on their supremacy. She knew that Zimbabwe was a corrupt country. It still had a long way to go. But it was too simple to place all the blame on Mugabe. The truth was more complicated.

She could see Ya Ru sitting at the other end of the table, closer to both the minister of trade and the lectern where Mugabe was speaking. He was doodling in his notepad. He used to do that even as a child, drawing matchstick men while he thought or listened, usually small devils jumping around, surrounded by burning bonfires. Nevertheless, Hong Qiu thought, he is most probably listening more intently than anybody else. He is sucking in every word to see what advantages he can gain in future business between the two countries, which is the real reason for our visit. What raw materials does Zimbabwe have that we need? How will we be able to get access to them at the cheapest price?

When the meeting was over and President Mugabe had left the big conference room, Ya Ru and Hong Qiu met each other by the doors. Her brother had been standing there, waiting for her. They each took a plate and filled it from the buffet table. Ya Ru drank wine, but Hong Qiu was content with a glass of water.

‘Why do you send me letters in the middle of the night?’

‘I had the irresistible feeling that it was important. I couldn’t wait.’

‘The man who knocked on my door knew that I was awake. How could he know that?’

Ya Ru raised an eyebrow in surprise.

‘There are different ways of knocking on a door, depending on whether the person behind it is awake or asleep.’