by Mai Jia
‘I felt sorry for her, but there was also a kind of professional respect at play. Nobody on the inside could get out, nobody on the outside could get close to us, and we were being watched constantly – how would you get a message out? I thought it was impossible, but she had found a way, an amazing way to do it! That wasn’t just a question of bravery, it took intelligence. I was so impressed. There’s an expression, isn’t there, about helping people achieve their ambitions? Well, in the end, that’s why I helped her. She’d come up with an extraordinarily ambitious plan and I wanted to carry it out for her. She’d done all the hard work, she’d managed to get it ninety-nine per cent realized; all I had to do was carry out that final step and a new legend would be born. It’s often said that people working in the same business are slow to appreciate their peers, but if you really do make it to the very top, it’s those same peers who’ll be your biggest admirers. That was certainly true for me; I admired Li Ningyu enormously, and I wanted to help her bring her plan to completion.’
When I heard her say that, I suddenly wanted to hug Madame Gu.
She was so open, so honest and so even-handed that I found I had no reason not to believe what she was saying. By contrast, when talking to old Mr Pan and my other interviewees, I’d come to feel that there were holes in their stories: sometimes because they were frightened, or because they were wallowing in reflected glory, or because they benefited from a particular version of events being accepted or had some other selfish motive. I could understand that; after all, it’s perfectly natural to want to get something out of it or to try and protect your own position. But in the face of the rare honesty shown by Madame Gu, I realized how ordinary the rest of them were.
As to my third question, she told me that Hihara, unable to decide who had been conspiring with Ghost, took everyone off the Tan Estate, including her. They were all sent to Shanghai for questioning. When they got there, she was separated from the others, and she had no idea where the rest of them went next. Eventually, both she and Police Chief Wang were allowed to return to their units, but nobody ever knew what happened to the others.
‘Nothing good will have befallen them,’ she said. ‘If they weren’t killed outright, they would at the least have suffered appallingly.’
There now remained only one question. Who killed Hihara?
‘Oh,’ Madame Gu said, ‘that was me. I had him sent down to hell!’
She told me the time and place of the murder, and explained very clearly who was involved and what they did at each stage, with full details. I am quite sure she wasn’t making it up.
According to her, it cost her four gold bars to hire two professional assassins to kill Hihara. At her request, they dismembered him and dumped his body by the side of the road. I asked her why she’d spent so much money to have him murdered, and in such a horrible way, with his corpse chopped into pieces. She stared at me in silence for a long time, before closing the subject down. ‘There are some things that people spend a lifetime trying to forget – it’s not very kind to keep asking about them!’
From a myriad of small signs, it was clear that Madame Gu had complicated feelings about the whole experience of being interviewed by me. On the one hand she wanted me to know the truth about what had happened, but on the other hand she also wanted everyone to forget all about it. She had hoped that these events would remain secret for all time, but the decision to talk about them had been forced on her. People were rewriting the history of that period and changing the facts, and that included me. The best way to stop that was to come forward herself and tell the truth. I think that must have been pretty much what Madame Gu felt. She kept reminding me that she was the only person with the right to explain what had gone on, and she warned me that I shouldn’t listen to gossip, that I had to believe that she was telling the truth.
Just before I said goodbye, she emphasized this to me yet again. ‘Young man, I am eighty-six years old now and I am going to die soon – in fact you could say that I am half-dead already. Do you think I got you to come all this way in order to lie to you, to concoct a story that would make me look good? What for? I’m past all of that now. What I want is the truth. Aren’t people on the Mainland always supposed to seek truth from facts; isn’t that the slogan we always hear? Well, that’s what I want, I want you to seek truth from facts – I want you to say what really happened. If I hadn’t got you to come here, if I hadn’t told you all this, you’d be able to distort what happened out of all recognition once I’m dead. You would then be responsible for creating a lie.’
I believed what she’d told me, but I was still a little puzzled. In my opinion, Madame Gu came out of this very well; in fact, we all owed her a debt of gratitude, so why had she tried to keep it all a secret?
It’s true that by then I’d already learnt something of what lay behind her reticence from Police Chief Wang’s family, but I decided not to reveal that. There were things that she wanted nobody ever to know and she was determined to take those secrets to the grave. I was prepared to keep them too, and I have no regrets about that decision. After all, in this world, there are always many more things that are kept secret than there are things that you are allowed to know.
First draft: 5.6.2007
Final draft: 1.7.2007
Conclusion Dead Calm
‘Dead calm’ is a term derived from meteorology, and in lay terms it means that there is no wind at all. In fact, there is always some kind of wind, because as long as there’s an air current, you will have breeze. It’s just that when airflow is below a certain level (<0.2m/s), we can’t feel it. People’s perceptions are very limited. There are many things that we cannot see, cannot hear and cannot feel, but they are still there, lurking around us, and may have a greater influence on us than the things that we are fully aware of.
I have entitled this section the ‘conclusion’, but I should explain that the story of Li Ningyu is already over; what I am going to talk about next has nothing to do with her. So what is it about? That’s hard to say. Although this part of my story is not directly connected with what’s gone before, it’s still important, for all that it is very confused. Just like life, all sorts of things are going to come up that do not fit within the neat structure of beginning, middle and end.
Some people say that the plot is the positive side of a novel. In that case, this is the negative side.
For superstitious reasons, I chose to write every word of this section either at night or on dark and rainy days, and I chose to reread my work in similar conditions, which may have had some unexpected results. There is supposed to be a book, the Dictionary of the Khazars, published in 1691, that will bring disaster on anyone reading it after midnight. I promise you that reading my book will not cause you any trouble, whatever time of day you choose for it.
ONE
1
After the wind from the east there came the wind from the west. A cross-straits war of words seemed inevitable.
When I got back from Taipei, I avoided Professor Pan. I don’t know how he found out that I’d gone to Taiwan to interview Madame Gu, but within the space of a few days I received a letter, two phone calls and a dozen text messages from him asking where I was and saying that he really wanted to see me. I was staying in the countryside, working on my manuscript (this is a fact; I was busy writing the section entitled ‘The Wind from the West’), and I really didn’t have time to talk to him.
It might seem as if I’d been influenced by Madame Gu and was now at odds with the Pan family too, but that wasn’t the case. My reasoning was purely practical – I was trying to protect myself. It was quite easy to imagine what would happen if we met. Sooner or later the conversation would turn to Madame Gu’s story, and once he heard what she’d said, he would marshal his forces for a counter-attack. Old Mr Pan would obviously spearhead this; flanking me on either side would be the elderly Mr Xin (one-time head of the Hangzhou underground, who appears in this book under his code name, Tiger) and Chen Jinming, the el
dest son of K, the senior Communist official at the Gathering of Heroes; and Police Chief Wang Tianxiang’s daughter, Wang Min, would bring up the rear along with Sentry A. They would have a whole bunch of researchers working on Party history cheering them on. A year earlier, it had been the recollections of these five, and various research papers, that had allowed me to write ‘The Wind from the East’. Now that someone had come forward to challenge their veracity, was it likely that they would just stand by and let all their hard work count for nothing?
Of course they would get together and launch a counter-attack!
If their counter-attack was ineffectual, that would be one thing, but I was worried lest their efforts actually dampened my enthusiasm for writing ‘The Wind from the West’. Writing can sometimes be like falling in love in that once you’ve discovered every lump and bump, you may find yourself in love no longer. What you’re talking about then is real life, and real life can make you feel really uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be on edge, gritting my teeth while I was finishing work on ‘The Wind from the West’.
So I decided to hide somewhere Professor Pan couldn’t find me. I would deal with him and the others after I’d finished writing. I would give them my manuscript and then they could say whatever they liked. I didn’t want to be partisan. I would do my very best to convey their views accurately, and having provoked the two sides into a war of words, I would report both what it was each side wanted to say and what it was they wanted nobody to know, their truth and lies, and let my readers decide for themselves. I have never believed what people say about crooks being able to hide among honest folk. I’m quite sure that crooks are crooks and honest folk are honest folk – if they get mixed up, it’s not difficult to separate them out again.
2
In the countryside, you can slow down.
Just as these days it’s no longer considered beautiful for a woman to be fat, it’s also not considered acceptable to go about things in a slow, relaxed manner. You’re supposed to move ever faster. If you were to travel to New York by boat, it would be taken as proof that you’re either off your head or poverty-stricken. Likewise, it’s no longer unusual for a couple to go to bed together pretty much straight away; that’s effectively a lifestyle choice and is not something to make a big deal about. But the fact that I’m still using the mobile phone I bought ten years ago is seen as worthy of comment and strikes some people as absolutely amazing.
I get countless comments about my not having adapted to the headlong rush of modern life; some admire this, others are snide or mocking. Even so, we are all caught up in this obsession with speed, we demand it, we won’t be satisfied without it. But hastiness is something that clever people have always tried to avoid; it’s a monster born from the wind, it’s a pirate ship that once it has you aboard will keep you captive. Unquestionably, it’s now easier to own a mobile phone than not, and easier to get a new phone than stick with your old one. We are racing ahead in desperate and dangerous pursuit of ever greater speed and we cannot slow down, since slowing down would mean swimming against the current and expending twice as much effort.
That’s the real reason I chose to go to the countryside to write. In the countryside I’m like a prisoner released from his shackles. I’m free; I have no other claims on my attention; I can go to work when the sun rises and rest when it sets. My energies are consumed in the slow process that is memory and waiting.
Waiting is also a desire for speed.
In other words, whether you choose to view this subjectively or objectively, the pace of my writing accelerated, and so I had reason to write proudly to Professor Pan: I am sure that I will finish this manuscript with all due haste, and I hope that after you have read it you will respond at the earliest possible moment.
The words ‘earliest possible moment’ imply hurry; they lifted their wings, speeding past in a flash, whistling as they went.
3
Eventually, an answer arrived from Professor Pan. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a reply but notification of a death. Mr Pan senior had passed away and the Professor hoped I would be able to attend the funeral.
I was suddenly worried in case it was my manuscript – Madame Gu’s version of events – that had caused a crisis and led to his death. If that was what had happened, then I really ought to attend the funeral, no matter how awkward I felt.
When I spoke with Professor Pan about this, he responded with his usual gentleness. ‘I am afraid that your manuscript did indeed cause my father’s death, but that doesn’t mean he passed away in anger – it’s quite possible that he was overcome with shame. If what you wrote is true and my father was still lying to everyone, even at his age, that really was… what can I say? I’m ashamed of him. My father was in hospital for seven days after his heart attack and there were several occasions when he tried to speak to us, but we couldn’t understand what he wanted. We really have no idea what exactly it was that upset him so much. That would be entirely typical of him, of course, to die with his secrets untold.’
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt as if I had killed a child and had no idea how to even begin to atone for what I’d done.
Professor Pan was a lovely man; not only did he not blame me, he tried to comfort me. He spoke very carefully. ‘A man of ninety has to face the fact of his mortality every day – after all, even a sneeze could carry him off. Your role in this is nothing more than that of a sneeze; there’s no reason to feel responsible. I am my father’s only child and I can promise you that the Pan family will not go after you for what’s happened. If you want, I can give you an official statement to that effect.’
He seemed so open-minded, so honest and friendly, but I wondered whether that might be a ploy to get me to suppress Madame Gu’s testimony and support old Mr Pan’s version instead. Was he being nice to me for selfish reasons? I decided to take the initiative. I told him that if Madame Gu was wrong in anything she’d said, all he had to do was tell me and I would respect his opinion. If necessary, I was even prepared to destroy my manuscript.
I was quite wrong. That was not what happened, not at all. Professor Pan explained quite clearly that with his father dead, he had nothing to say. ‘It’s not that I don’t have an opinion about all of this but that I don’t feel the need to express it. I’m sure the Party has already decided what contribution my father made, so whatever anyone else says now, they’ll just be wasting their time.’
It was because of this that Professor Pan was particularly conscious of the wording of the eulogy that the Party had provided for his father. He repeatedly proposed amendments, to the point where it seemed like he was quibbling. But that doesn’t mean that he got his way. Indeed, the fact that he refused to allow me to reprint the text of the eulogy here suggests that he wasn’t happy with the final wording determined by the Party hierarchy.
4
As the last surviving representative of that generation, Mr Pan senior was given an extremely formal memorial ceremony. He had previously been employed at Unit 701, and they had a committee responsible for organizing funerals, which made sure an obituary was published in the papers. Vast numbers of people came to express their condolences, including three very senior Party leaders, which meant that the whole thing had to be done on an even grander scale than originally planned.
The memorial ceremony lasted for three full days. The first day was for family members and old friends, and the entire place was awash with tears. On the second day it was old Mr Pan’s former comrades-in-arms who came, together with colleagues and representatives from each division of Unit 701, and the current leadership. They were all very solemn and everyone was pretty much silent. On the third day it was representatives of the local government, together with anyone who’d been unable to make it on the previous two days. There were also some people who just turned up uninvited. Of course, old Mr Xin (Tiger) came in person, together with K’s son, Chen Jinming. Police Chief Wang Tianxiang’s daughter Wang Min was there, and so was Sentry A,
as well as their families. All of them came with wreaths, and in the end there were so many that it must have taken half a dozen trucks to remove them.
On the very last evening, Professor Pan came to see me at my hotel. He brought me two things: my manuscript and a CD. I had sent him the manuscript by email, and there was no reason for him to give it back to me, so I assumed that this must represent some kind of emotional closure for him – what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.
I took back my manuscript and asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to offer an opinion?’
He shook his head. I was hoping that he would say something. His silence implied that a mistake had been made, that maybe Madame Gu was in the right.
But as I renewed my attack, he suddenly turned on me. ‘Did you notice, on the second day, when so many people came from Unit 701 where my father used to work, how many people cried? Not one. Nobody shed a single tear. Why not? Because none of them believe in tears.’
‘What are you trying to say?’ I asked.
‘In your manuscript it says that in the end Madame Gu decided to help my aunt, Li Ningyu, get her message out because she was moved by her tears. Do you really think that can be true? You ought to know by now that these are very special people: they don’t trust emotional displays of any kind. Speaking as my father’s son, I’ve already said that I have nothing to say about your story. But speaking as a reader, particularly as a reader with knowledge of the kind of people that feature in your book, I feel that… this is something that deserves further consideration. Because, as it stands, the key to your plot rests on very dubious foundations, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’
I thought the counter-attack was now underway. But in the blink of an eye it was over. Other than recommending that I rewrite that crucial scene, he made no further suggestions – in fact, he refused to say another word. There was definitely something going on there. His silence was making me very curious.