The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  About the Book

  Five lives to live, one life to die . . .

  Beijing, 2008, the Olympics are coming, but as taxi driver Wang circles the city’s congested streets, he feels barely alive. His daily grind is suddenly interrupted when he finds a letter in the sunshade of his cab. Someone is watching him. Someone who claims to be his soulmate and to have known him for over a thousand years.

  Other letters follow, taking Wang back in time: to a spirit-bride in the Tang Dynasty; to young slaves during the Mongol invasion; to concubines plotting to kill the emperor; to a kidnapping in the Opium War; and to Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

  And with each letter, Wang feels the watcher in the shadows growing closer . . .

  Sweeping between China past and present, THE INCARNATIONS illuminates the cyclical nature of history, and shows how man is condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. The First Letter

  2. Wang Jun

  3. The Second Letter

  4. Estrangements

  5. The Third Letter

  6. Night Coming

  7. Year of the Rat

  8. The Wedding Photo

  9. The Alley

  10. Mindsickness

  11. The Watcher

  12. The Fourth Letter

  13. Arise, Slaves, Arise!

  14. The Birthday Gift

  15. Sleeping Pills

  16. The Torch

  17. The Fifth Letter

  18. Sixteen Concubines

  19. Retaliation

  20. Yida

  21. The Sixth Letter

  22. Sirens

  23. Ah Qin and the Sea

  24. Bruises

  25. Liars

  26. Train Station

  27. The Fire

  28. The Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls

  29. Rebirth

  30. The Wake

  Read more from Susan Barker

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Barker

  Copyright

  The Incarnations

  Susan Barker

  For Robbie

  I ask, in this boundless land, who is the master of man’s destiny?

  Mao Zedong

  1

  The First Letter

  EVERY NIGHT I wake from dreaming. Memory squeezing the trigger of my heart and blood surging through my veins.

  The dreams go into a journal. Cold sweat on my skin, adrenaline in my blood, I illuminate my cement room with the 40-watt bulb hanging overhead and, huddled under blankets, flip open my notebook and spill ink across the feint-ruled page. Capturing the ephemera of dreams, before they fade from memory.

  I dream of teenage girls, parading the Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts around the running tracks behind our school. I dream of the tall dunce hats on our former teachers’ ink-smeared heads, the placards around their necks. Down with Headteacher Yang! Down with Black Gangster Zhao! I dream of Teacher Wu obeying our orders to slap Headteacher Yang, to the riotous cheers of the mob.

  I dream that we stagger on hunger-weakened limbs through the Gobi as the Mongols drive us forth with lashing whips. I dream of razor-beaked birds swooping at our heads, and scorpions scuttling amongst scattered, sun-bleached bones on the ground. I dream of a mirage of a lake on shimmering waves of heat. I dream that, desperate to cure our raging thirst, we crawl there on our hands and knees.

  I dream of the sickly Emperor Jiajing, snorting white powdery aphrodisiacs up his nostrils, and hovering over you on the fourposter bed with an erection smeared with verdigris. I dream of His Majesty urging us to ‘operate’ on each other with surgical blades lined up in a velvet case. I dream of sixteen palace ladies gathered in the Pavilion of Melancholy Clouds, plotting the ways and means to murder one of the worst emperors ever to reign.

  Newsprint blocks the windows and electricity drips through the cord into the 40-watt bulb. For days I have been at my desk, preparing your historical records, my fingers stiffened by the cold, struggling to hit the correct keys. The machine huffs and puffs and lapses out of consciousness. I reboot and wait impatiently for its resuscitation, several times a day. Between bouts of writing I pace the cement floor. The light bulb casts my silhouette on the walls. A shadow of a human form, which possesses more corporeality than I do.

  The Henan migrants gamble and scrape chair legs in the room above. I curse and bang the ceiling with a broom. I don’t go out. I hunch at my desk and tap at the keyboard, and the machine wheezes and gasps, as though protesting the darkness I feed into its parts. My mind expands into the room. My subconscious laps at the walls, rising like the tide. I am drowning in our past lives. But until they have been recorded, they won’t recede.

  I watch you most days. I go to the Maizidian housing compound where you live and watch you. Yesterday I saw you by the bins, talking to Old Pang the recycling collector, the cart attached to his Flying Pigeon loaded with plastic bottles, scavenged to exchange for a few fen at the recycling bank. Old Pang grumbled about the cold weather and the flare-up in his arthritis that prevents him reaching the bottom of the bins. So you rolled up your coat sleeve and offered to help. Elbow-deep you groped, fearless of broken glass, soapy tangles of plughole hair and congealed leftovers scraped from plates. You dug up a wedge of styrofoam. ‘Can you sell this?’ you asked. Old Pang turned the styrofoam over in his hands, then secured it to his cart with a hook-ended rope. He thanked you, climbed on his Flying Pigeon and pedalled away.

  After Old Pang’s departure you stood by your green and yellow Citroën, reluctant to get back to work. You stared at the grey sky and the high-rises of glass and steel surrounding your housing compound. The December wind swept your hair and rattled your skeleton through your thin coat. The wind eddied and corkscrewed and whistled through its teeth at you. You had no sense of me watching you at all.

  You got back inside your cab and I rapped my knuckles on the passenger-side window. You nodded and I pulled the back door open by the latch. You turned to me, your face bearing no trace of recognition as you muttered, ‘Where to?’

  Purple Bamboo Park. A long journey across the city from east to west. I watched you from the back as you yawned and tuned the radio dial from the monotonous speech of a politburo member to the traffic report. Beisanzhong Road. Heping South Bridge. Madian Bridge. Bumper to bumper on the Third ring road, thousands of vehicles consumed petrol, sputtered exhaust and flashed indicator lights. You exhaled a long sigh and unscrewed the lid of your flask of green tea. I swallowed hard.

  I breathed your scent of cigarettes and sweat. I breathed you in, tugging molecules of you through my sinuses and trachea, and deep into my lungs. Your knuckles were white as bone as you gripped the steering wheel. I wanted to reach above the headrest and touch your thinning hair. I wanted to touch your neck.

  Zhongguancun Road, nearly there. Thirty minutes over in a heartbeat. Your phone vibrated and you held it to your ear. Your wife. Yes, hmmm, yes, seven o’clock. Yida is a practical woman. A thrifty, efficient homemaker who cooks for you, nurtures you and provides warmth beside you in bed at night. I can tell that she fulfils the needs of the flesh, this pretty wife of yours. But what about the needs of the spirit? Surely you ache for what she lacks?

  Purple Bamboo Park, east gate. On the meter, 30 RMB. I handed you some tattered 10-RMB notes; the chubby face of Chairman Mao grubby from the fingers of ten thousand laobaixing. A perfunctory thank-you and I slammed out. There was a construction site nearby, and the thoughts in my head jarred and jangled as the pneumatic drills smashed the concrete
up. I stood on the kerb and watched you drive away. Taxi-driver Wang Jun. Driver ID number 394493. Thirty-one, careworn, a smoker of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes. The latest in your chain of incarnations, like the others, selected by the accident of rebirth, the lottery of fate.

  Who are you? you must be wondering. I am your soulmate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of sixteen million in search of you. I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What’s the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared for over a thousand years? What will happen to her when I reappear in your life?

  What will become of her then?

  2

  Wang Jun

  THROUGH THE WINDSCREEN of his taxi, Wang has seen the city change. He has seen the wrecking balls swing, bulldozers levelling streets to rubble and dust, and skyscrapers rising like bamboo after the rain. Land and planning permission is bought and sold. Property developers draw circles on maps and, in weeks, all that is circled disappears; the residents exiled to the far-flung suburbs and demolition crews moving in to clear out the rest. In the decade Wang has been a taxi driver, the city has changed radically. And as the dust of construction gusts across the city, sheet after sheet, he often wonders when it will end.

  Pedestrians wave him down and Wang drives them all over Beijing. He is mostly silent throughout his twelve-hour shift, and most passengers behave as though he’s not there, or as if he’s a mechanical part of the car, like the gear stick or steering wheel. They don’t censor what they say in the back seat, and some of the conversations lure Wang’s attention in. Investment bankers bragging of profits of millions of yuan. A middle-school student with metal braces on her teeth, describing to a saucer-eyed friend how she lost her virginity (‘I bled, but not that much . . .’). Scientists from the Institute of Meteorological Sciences debating the ethics of cloud-seeding – the Weather Modification Office’s strategy of firing silver iodide up into the clouds, to wring out some rain. (‘Man must defeat the Heavens,’ the woman scientist insisted, quoting Mao.) Money is what his passengers talk of most. ‘How much per square metre?’ ‘How much for the upgrade?’ ‘How much do you earn?’ ‘How much?’ ‘How much?’ Beijingers are richer now than when Wang first started out as a driver, and his fares click compulsively at shiny metallic laptops and fidget with the latest gadgets in the back. They are shallow, materialistic and vain. But Wang would like to be wealthy too. To own a modern high-rise two-bedroom apartment. To send his daughter, Echo, to private school and have braces put on her teeth.

  Confident that Wang is no one of importance, passengers rarely exercise caution in his cab. Wang has been privy to the offering of bribes to men in suits. To the haggling down of the price of women, bought and sold in bulk. To the trading of forged passports and negotiation of human-smuggling fees. Once a guy in his twenties hired Wang out for an afternoon. When it became apparent, as they drove from address to address, that he was dealing drugs, Wang asked what he was selling. ‘Cocaine,’ the dealer had said. ‘How does it get to Beijing?’ Wang had asked. ‘Flown to Kazakhstan in drug mules,’ he was told. ‘Stuffed in condoms in stomachs. In the soles of shoes.’ ‘Aren’t you afraid of the death penalty?’ Wang asked, and the dealer had laughed: ‘When it comes to the police, there are ways of getting off the hook.’

  Lovers quarrel in his taxi. They fight about sex and abortion and extramarital affairs. Sometimes they remember he is there: ‘Shush . . . the driver . . .’ ‘Fuck the driver! What does what he think matter?’ And they go on with their row. Wang knows how manipulative the lovesick can be. The recklessness of those afflicted with the mental illness of romantic love. Wang’s back seat has known more melodrama than any far-fetched TV soap.

  Sometimes, late at night, when passengers are drunk and lonely and heading home to an empty bed, they unburden themselves to Wang, pouring out their unhappy personal lives to this safe, anonymous taxi driver. They ask his advice. Sometimes they ask for more than his advice. One woman in her thirties, whose boss had recently ended their affair, had said casually to Wang, ‘Can you take me somewhere and fuck me? I need cheering up.’ When Wang had protested that he had a wife and child, she had laughed and said, ‘That’s never stopped any man I’ve ever known.’ The woman was plain-looking, but fiery and bold, and Wang could see what had attracted her boss. He imagined driving her to an empty car park, and shifting back the driver’s seat so she could hitch up her skirt and straddle him, and he was tempted. But he couldn’t do it. The woman stared out at the drizzly night streets of Beijing as he drove her the rest of the way home, not saying a word. Wang offered to waive her fare, but she made a point of paying him in full.

  They are careless, his passengers. Not only do they spill intimate secrets in his taxi, they leave possessions behind too. Umbrellas, gloves, scarves, tubes of lipstick, cigarettes, cough drops and keys. Vials of Viagra and strips of birth-control pills. Tickets to the Beijing opera. Maps and guidebooks in Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. Minutes from the annual meeting of the Optometrists’ Society of Tianjin. More than once Wang has leapt out of his bones at a shrill ringing in the empty back seat.

  The ID on the fare receipts means any theft would be traced back to him, so Wang turns everything in to the taxi company’s lost-property depot. In nearly a decade he has stolen only one thing: a self-assembly kite in a box, the frame slotting together to make a magnificent dragon with a one-metre wing-span. Wang saw the forgotten kite in the back seat. Then he saw the receipt of the old man who owned it, poking like a tongue from the meter at the journey’s end. A stroke of luck. That weekend Wang and Echo flew the kite together in Chaoyang Park, the crimson dragon fluttering its tail as it darted over the lakes and trees. As he watched Echo that day, smiling and gazing up to the kite in the sky, Wang thought of the old man and tried not to feel bad. What’s the good of one person clinging to his morals when everyone else is so corrupt? What’s the good of that?

  Wang is driving east down Workers Stadium Road when, squinting in the sun, he flips down the visor above the driver’s seat and an envelope falls on to his lap. Must be Baldy Zhang’s, he thinks. Then he sees his name. Wang pulls over into the bicycle lane and slides his thumb under the adhesive seal. The letter is printed on four sheets of A4. As he reads a woman dragging a suitcase on wheels taps on the window. Wang switches off the for-hire sign and waves her away. After reading the letter he refolds it and stuffs it back in the envelope. Workers Stadium Road reverberates with engines as cars flow to the east and to the west. Ignitions growl, rickshaw bells brrring and horns beep. Migrant workers with greasy hair and padding spilling out of ripped jackets trudge up the pedestrian overpass, shouldering heavy bags. The street seems changed somehow. As though everything is a façade for something hiding beneath. He wants to call Baldy Zhang, but knows that he sleeps until dusk. Wang smokes a cigarette, then calls his wife instead.

  Yida is at work and the phone rings and rings. Wang sees her in one of the private rooms at Dragonfly Massage, under the sensual, dimmer-switch-on-low lighting, standing over a customer on the massage table in her clinical white uniform. Wang sees her as a customer sees her. A pretty 29-year-old masseur with bronzed skin and a wilderness of curls that tumble and fall from any barrette or butterfly clip she uses to hold them back. Firm calves. Lips that don’t need lipstick. Hazel eyes flecked with gold. ‘Where are you from?’ customers ask when they hear her accent. And as she tells them, they nod and recoil slightly, as though the soil and toil of peasant life still clings to her skin. There are facts about his wife’s occupation Wang can’t stomach. The fact that her male clients strip to their underwear. The fact that with her bare hands (moisturized, the nails clipped) she kneads and caresses every part of the male flesh. Shoulders, lower back, buttocks, inner thighs. Her upper-arm muscles rippling with strength as she attends to her bare-chested customers in the aromatherapy-oil-scented room. Wang knows what’s on a man’s mind when he is massaged by a pretty girl. And so does Yida. When she was a teenager, new to Beijing and ripe fo
r exploitation, she worked in a parlour where bringing a client to a climax with her hand was an ordinary part of the massage routine. She’d wiped up the semen afterwards, she confessed, as casually as a waitress mopping up a spilt drink in a café.

  She answers on the seventeenth ring.

  ‘How come it took you so long to answer?’ asks Wang.

  ‘The phone was in my locker . . .’

  ‘Were you with a customer?’

  ‘No. I’ve had no customers yet . . .’

  She sighs, weary of her husband’s jealousy. ‘What is it, Wang? Is something wrong?’

  ‘No. Nothing’s wrong . . .’

  And Wang changes his mind about telling her. He says, ‘I was thinking of you. That’s all.’

  Yida softens. ‘Are you sure that there’s nothing wrong?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

  In the Public Security Bureau in Tuan Jie Hu, there are three policemen behind the enquiries desk. Two of them are Wang’s age. Thugs with crew cuts, fogging the police station with wreaths of cigarette smoke. The third policeman is sixtyish with kind-looking eyes. Wang takes the letter to him. He tells him where he found it and describes the contents. The policeman reads the first page: ‘I don’t understand.’ Wang shows him the part where the writer confesses to stalking him.

  ‘Do you remember driving a fare to Purple Bamboo Park? After talking to the recycling collector?’ the policeman asks.

  ‘No. I don’t remember.’

  The letter is put under the photocopier lid and reproduced for police records with mechanical whirrings and flashes of light. The policeman then asks for Wang’s ID card. He taps his ID number into the computer and Wang’s personal file comes up on the screen. When the policeman looks at Wang again, the kindness has gone from his eyes.

  ‘Mr Wang,’ he says, ‘why don’t I take a look at your car?’

  The policeman checks the door handles and windows for signs of forced entry. He opens the glove compartment and, rummaging about, finds Baldy Zhang’s baijiu. He opens the brand-new bottle and sniffs, then pockets it without a word. He looks at Wang as though he is wasting his time.