The Man From Beijing

by Henning Mankell

  So you are one in a billion Chinese faces, Birgitta thought. I shall never find you. I shall never discover who you are. And if the name you gave was genuine. And above all, what you did.

  She slowly made her way to the departure gate for the flight to Beijing. A queue was already forming. This is where Asia begins, she thought. Borders are distorted by airports, closer but at the same time further away.

  Her seat was 22C. Next to her was a dark-skinned man working for a British company in the Chinese capital. They exchanged a few pleasantries, but neither of them wished to become involved in a serious conversation. She curled up under her blanket. Her excitement had now given way to a feeling of having embarked upon a journey without being properly prepared. What would she actually do in Beijing? Wander the streets, look at people and track down museums? It was quite certain that Karin Wiman wouldn’t have much time to spend with Birgitta. She wondered if something of the insecure Rebel still survived inside her.

  Halfway through the flight, just as they crossed the border into China, the captain announced that a sandstorm had made it impossible to land in Beijing. They would land in a town called Taiyuan and wait for the weather to improve. After landing they were bussed to a freezing cold terminal where well-wrapped-up Chinese were waiting in silence. The time difference was making her feel tired and unsure of her first impressions of China. The countryside was covered in snow, the airport surrounded by hills, and on a nearby road she could see buses and ox carts.

  Two hours later the sandstorm in Beijing had died down. The flight took off, then landed again. When she had passed through all the controls, she found Karin waiting for her.

  ‘The Rebel has landed,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Beijing!’

  ‘Thank you. It hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m really here.’

  ‘You are in the Middle Kingdom. At the centre of the world. In the centre of life.’

  That evening of the first day, she found herself standing on the nineteenth floor of the hotel, in the room she was sharing with Karin. She gazed out over the glittering, gigantic city and felt a shiver of expectation.

  In another skyscraper at the same time stood a man looking out over the same city and the same lights as Birgitta Roslin.

  He was holding a red ribbon in his hand. When he heard a subdued knock on the door behind him, he turned round slowly to receive the visitor for whom he had been waiting impatiently.

  The Chinese Game

  22

  On her first morning in Beijing, Birgitta Roslin went out early. She had breakfasted in the gigantic dining room with Karin Wiman, who then hurried off to attend her conference, having explained how she was looking forward to hearing what was to be said about the old emperors. For Karin Wiman history was in many ways more alive than the real world in which she lived.

  Birgitta had been given a map by a young lady at the front desk who was very beautiful and spoke almost perfect English. A quotation came into her mind. The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance. It was one of Mao’s sayings that kept cropping up in the heated debates that were held in the spring of 1968.

  The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance. The words echoed in her mind as she left the hotel and passed the silent and very young men dressed in green who were guarding the entrance. The carriageway in front of her was wide with many traffic lanes. Cars everywhere, hardly any bicycles. The street was lined with imposing bank buildings and also a five-storey bookshop. People were standing outside the shop with large plastic sacks full of bottles of water. After only a few paces Birgitta could feel the pollution in her throat and nose and the taste of metal in her mouth. In sites not already occupied by buildings, the arms oftall cranes were in constant motion. It was obvious that she was in a city undergoing fundamental and hectic change.

  A man was pulling an overloaded cart piled high with what looked like empty chicken cages; he seemed to be in the wrong century. Apart from that she could have been anywhere else in the world.

  When I was young, she thought, I saw in my mind’s eye an endless mass of Chinese peasants in identical quilted clothes toiling with picks and spades, surrounded by chanting revolutionaries waving red flags, transforming rocky hills into fertile fields. The teeming crowds are still here, but in Beijing at least, in the street where I am now standing, the people are not as I anticipated. They are not even on bicycles; they have cars, and the women are wearing elegant high-heeled shoes as they march along the pavements.

  During those days when the Swedish masses were preparing to assemble in town squares and chant the sayings of the great Chinese leader, in Birgitta’s imagination all Chinese people were dressed in identical baggy grey-blue uniforms, wore identical caps, had the same close-cropped hair and furrowed brows.

  Occasionally, in the late 1960s, when she had received an issue of the illustrated magazine China, she had been surprised by all the healthy-looking people with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes raising their arms to the god that had come down from heaven, the Great Helmsman, the Eternal Teacher, and all the other names he had been given, the mysterious Mao. But he had not actually been mysterious. That would become clearer as time passed. He was a politician with a shrewd feeling for what was happening in the gigantic Chinese Empire. Until independence in 1949 he had been one of those unique leaders that history very occasionally produces. But after coming to power he brought about much suffering, chaos and confusion. Nevertheless, nobody could take away from him the fact that, like a modern emperor, he had resurrected the China that was by this stage well on the way to becoming a world power.

  Standing now outside her gleaming hotel with its marble portals and elegantly dressed receptionists speaking flawless English, she felt as if she’d been transported into a world she knew nothing about. Was this really the society in which the upswing of the peasants’ revolt had been such a major event?

  That was forty years ago, she thought. More than a generation. Then I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation. We were not urged to commit collective suicide, because the Day of Judgement was nigh, but to give up our individuality for the benefit of a collective intoxication, at the heart of which was a Little Red Book that had replaced all other forms of enlightenment. It contained all wisdom, the answers to all questions, expressions of all the social and political visions the world needed in order to progress from its present state and install once and for all paradise on earth, rather than a paradise in some remote kingdom in the sky. But what we didn’t even begin to understand was that the sayings comprised living words. They were not inscribed in stone. They described reality. We read the sayings without interpreting them. As if the Little Red Book was a dead catechism, a revolutionary liturgy.

  It took Birgitta Roslin more than an hour to get to Tiananmen Square – the Square of Heavenly Peace. It was the biggest square she had ever seen. She approached it via a pedestrian passage under Jianguomennei Dajie. The place was teeming with people on all sides as she walked across it. Wherever she turned there were people taking photographs, waving flags, selling bottles of water and picture postcards.

  She stopped and looked around. The sky above her was hazy. Something was missing. It was some time before it dawned on her what it was.

  There were no birds at all. But people were milling around everywhere, people who wouldn’t notice if she stayed or suddenly left.

  She remembered the images from 1989, when the young students had demonstrated in support of their demands to be able to think and speak freely, and the final solution when tanks had rumbled into the square and many of the demonstrators had been massacred. This is where a young man had been standing with a white plastic bag in his hand, she thought. The whole world saw him on television, and people held their breath. He had stood in front of a tank and refused to give way. Like an insignificant little tin soldier he personified all the resistance a human being is capable of. When
they tried to pass by the side of him, he moved sideways as well. What happened in the end she didn’t know. She had never seen a picture of that. But all those crushed by the tracks of the tanks or shot by the soldiers had been real people.

  These events were the second starting point for her relationship with China. A large part of her life was embedded in the period between being a Rebel who invoked Mao Zedong to proclaim absurdly that the revolution had already begun among Swedish students in 1968 and the image of the young man standing in front of the tank in 1989. In just over twenty years she had developed from a young and idealistic student to a mother of four children and a district judge. The concept of China had always been a part of her. First as a dream, then as something she realised she didn’t really understand at all, as it was so big and full of contradictions. She discovered that her children had a very different idea of China. They associated it with enormous future possibilities, just as the dream of America had characterised her own generation and that of her parents. To her surprise, David had recently told her that when he had children he would try to hire a Chinese nanny so that they could learn the language from the very start.

  She wandered around Tiananmen Square, watching people take photographs and the police who were a constant presence. In the background was the building where, in 1949, Mao had proclaimed the birth of the Republic. When she started to feel cold, she walked the long way back to her hotel. Karin had promised to skip the formal lunches and eat with her instead.

  There was a restaurant on the top floor of the skyscraper in which they were staying. They were given a window table with views over the vast city. Birgitta told her about her long walk to the enormous square and her reflections on their youth.

  They ate several small Chinese dishes and finished off the meal with tea. Birgitta produced the brochure with the handwritten Chinese characters Karin had deciphered as the name of the hospital Longfu.

  ‘I intend to devote my afternoon to visiting that hospital,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s always a good idea to have something specific to do when you’re wandering around in a city you don’t know. Anything at all would do. If you don’t have a plan, your feet get tired. I don’t have anybody to visit, and nothing in particular that I want to see. But who knows, I might find a sign with these characters on it. I can come back here and tell you that you were right.’

  They parted outside the lifts. Karin needed to hurry back to her conference. Birgitta went to their room on the nineteenth floor and lay down on the bed to rest.

  She had started to sense it during her morning walk through the streets – a feeling of listlessness that she couldn’t quite pin down. Surrounded by people, or alone in this anonymous hotel in the gigantic city, she felt her identity starting to fade away. Who would miss her if she got lost? Who would even notice that she existed?

  She had had a similar experience previously, when she was very young. Suddenly ceasing to exist, losing her grip on her identity.

  She felt impatient and got up, then stood by the window. A long way down below was the city, all the people, each one with his or her dreams that Birgitta knew nothing about.

  She gathered the clothes that were scattered around the room and locked the door behind her. All she was doing was whipping up feelings of unrest that were becoming increasingly difficult to handle. She needed to move about, get to know the city. Karin had promised to take her to a performance of the Peking Opera that evening.

  According to the map, Longfu was quite a trek. But she had plenty of time. She walked along the straight and apparently endless streets until she finally came to the hospital, after having passed a large art gallery.

  Longfu consisted of two buildings. She counted seven storeys, all in white and grey. The windows on the ground floor were barred. The blinds were closed, and old flowerboxes filled with withered leaves stood on the window ledges. The trees outside the hospital were bare; the brown, parched lawns were covered in dog dirt. Her first impression was that Longfu looked more like a prison than a hospital. She entered the grounds. An ambulance drove past, then another. Next to the main entrance was a notice in Chinese. She compared it with what was written in the brochure – she had come to the right place. A doctor in a white coat was standing outside the entrance, smoking and talking loudly into a mobile phone.

  She went back out onto the street and wandered around the big residential area. Wherever she looked old men were sitting on the pavements playing board games.

  It was when she came to the corner of the extensive hospital grounds that it dawned on her what she had seen without thinking about it. On the other side of the street was a new skyscraper. She took the Chinese brochure out of her pocket. There was the building. There was no doubt about it. On the very top floor was a terrace, the likes of which she had never seen before. It projected from the side of the building like the forecastle of a ship. The facade of the skyscraper was covered in dark-tinted glass panels. Armed guards stood outside the high entrance. Presumably the building contained offices rather than residences. She stood on the lee side of a tree where she was partly protected from the freezing cold wind. Some men came out of the tall doors, which seemed to be made of copper, and stepped into waiting black cars. A tempting thought struck her. She checked that she still had the photograph of Wang Min Hao in her pocket. If he was somehow connected with this building, perhaps one of the guards might recognise him. But what would she say if they nodded and said he was indeed in there?

  She couldn’t make up her mind what to do. Before she showed anybody the photograph, she must think up a reason for wanting to see him. Obviously, she couldn’t mention the murders in Hesjövallen. But whatever she said would need to be plausible.

  A young man stopped by her side. He said something that she couldn’t make out. Then she realised that he was speaking English to her.

  ‘Are you lost? Can I help you?’

  ‘I’m just looking at that handsome building over there. Do you know who owns it?’

  He shook his head in surprise.

  ‘I study to be vet. I know nothing of tall buildings. Can I help you? I try to teach me speak better English.’

  ‘Your English is very good.’ She pointed up at the projecting terrace. ‘I wonder who lives there?’

  ‘Somebody who is very rich.’

  ‘Can you help me?’ she said. She took out the photograph of Wang Min Hao. ‘Can you go over to the guards and ask them if they know this man? If they ask why you want to know, just say somebody asked you to give him a message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘Tell them you’ll fetch it. Come back here. I shall wait by the hospital entrance.’

  ‘Why not ask them yourself?’ he said.

  ‘I’m too shy. I don’t think a Western woman on her own should ask about a Chinese man.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She tried to look as casual as possible, but was beginning to regret her ploy. However, he took the photograph and was about to leave.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘Ask them who lives up there, on the top floor. It looks like an apartment with a big terrace.’

  ‘My name is Huo,’ he said. ‘I will ask.’

  ‘My name’s Birgitta. Just pretend to be interested.’

  ‘Where you from? USA?’

  ‘Sweden. Ruidian, I think it’s called in Chinese.’

  ‘I do not know where that is.’

  ‘It’s almost impossible to explain.’

  As he started to cross the road, she turned and hurried back to the hospital entrance.

  An old man on crutches came slowly out of the open entrance door. She suddenly had the feeling that she was exposing herself to danger. She calmed herself down by noting that the street was full of people. A man who had killed a lot of people in the north of Sweden might get away with it. But not someone who murdered a Western tourist in a busy street. In broad daylight. China coul
dn’t afford that.

  The man with the crutches suddenly fell over. The young police officers on guard by the entrance made no move. She hesitated, but then helped the man back onto his feet. A mass of words came tumbling out of his mouth, but she didn’t understand, nor could she tell if he was grateful or angry. He smelled strongly of spices – or alcohol. He continued walking through the grounds towards the street.

  Huo came back. He appeared to be calm and wasn’t looking furtively around. Birgitta went to meet him.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Nobody has seen this man.’

  ‘Nobody knew who he was?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Who did you show the picture to?’

  ‘The guards. Another man came as well. From inside the house. He had sunglasses. Do I pronounce that right? “Sunglasses”?’

  ‘Very good. Who lives on the top floor?’

  ‘They did not answer that.’

  ‘But somebody lives there?’

  ‘I think so. They did not like the question.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They told me to go away.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  He looked at her in surprise.

  ‘I went away.’

  She took an American ten-dollar bill from her purse. He didn’t want to accept it at first. He returned the photograph of Wang Min Hao and asked which hotel she was staying at, made sure she knew her way back there, then bowed politely as he said goodbye.

  On the way back to the hotel she once again had the vertiginous feeling that she could be swallowed up by the mass of humanity at any moment and never found again. She felt so dizzy that she was obliged to lean against a wall. There was a tea house not far away. She went in, ordered tea and biscuits, and tried to take long, deep breaths. Here it was again, the feeling of panic that had occasionally overwhelmed her in recent years. The long journey to Beijing had not provided any release from the worries that were weighing her down.