by Xiaolu Guo
Iona hears Jonathan breathing. She says nothing.
“And that was far from being the end of the story. Yesterday we found that someone has hacked into our archives and had gone through all our electronic files … All your emails have been deleted and the files with your translation corrupted or deleted, too. It’s a good thing you have your own copy!”
Jonathan’s voice becomes subdued, as if he is not particularly keen to discuss this on the phone.
“I might be paranoid. But you never know. It’s scary, Iona, I can’t be too careful. If the Chinese government is watching what I’m doing … maybe even what you’re doing—well … I’ve got to take this call really seriously. I’ve kept quiet about the book with everyone, except you.”
Iona waits. “So what does this mean? What are you going to do with my translation?”
Jonathan speaks slowly, with an uncertain tone. “I am thinking of shelving the project. At least for now.”
“Shelving it?” Iona is devastated.
“At least for a little while. Let the heat of their interest in us blow over. In a couple of years they’ll have forgotten all about it. I need to be careful, Iona. I’m responsible for the future of my company, the job security of my employees,” Jonathan says in a resigned voice. “And then, just to top it all off, this morning my assistant tried to get me a visa to go to China, thinking it might be a good idea to find out a bit more on the ground, as it were. I was planning on telling you about it. But the Embassy have refused my visa application outright. No explanation, just a few words from an official source: ‘We have been informed that for political reasons we are not able to issue you the visa until we receive further instruction.’ So that’s it, the door to China closed for me.”
“But …” is all Iona can say. Her urgency and energy seem to have dwindled to nothing. Outside, the pale winter sun has made its exit, leaving only layers of dull British clouds hanging in bloated forms. The Atlantic wind sweeps the streets, carrying dead sycamore leaves, ushering them into drains and front gardens. People on bikes and in cars rush onward, to homes, to warmly lit pubs, or to what might be oblivion, anywhere to escape the forecast storm.
3 LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013
Iona gets off at Shoreditch High Street station, galvanised by a single purpose and turns up Bethnal Green Road. She feels thirsty, in her throat, but also in her mind. On this busy and crowded street in the east end of London, she is forced to slow down and join the stream of jostling bodies. The haphazard stalls lining the side of the road brim with clothes and people buying and selling. There are cheap home products, pots and pans, trinkets and toys. The bargain hunters are veiled Bangladeshi or Indian women. It feels for a moment as if she has been transported to some Dhaka side street, and that she herself is a local wife, searching for ingredients for tonight’s curry among the tindoras and gongura leaves spread out on metal platters. Iona keeps walking and turns into one of the side streets, until she arrives at a four-floor brown-brick council block, one of London’s 1970s monuments to immigrant workers.
Iona checks the sign on the front of the building. The fenced gardens and public corridors, the balconies with their newly-washed laundry strung on clothes lines, dark red-brick festooned with sari fabric and windows clogged with potted plants and domestic relics. In the courtyard, a group of black kids are kicking a football around with boisterous yelps. As she climbs up and up the concrete stairs she feels a panic rising. Number 35. Iona watches her hand knock on the green door. Her knock is timid, awkward and she even has a strange feeling of criminality. She waits, it’s quiet inside. She waits patiently, secretly hoping no one will ever open this door. What is she supposed to say if a Chinese woman were to open it? How would she introduce herself? Would she ask her if she still writes poetry, if she still thinks of a Beijing dissident and their life together in the subterranean bars of the Chao Yang district? Or would that be too intrusive, too like a ghost knocking from the past? Perhaps she might find a surprising scene: inside the door, both Jian and Mu there, living together. Would Mu even ask her in? But of course Iona knows that she’s totally unknown to them, she does not exist in their lives, in the way that they do in hers. She is at best a voyeur. She has fed on their life’s meaning, but it has left her feeling empty, famished, and now, here, standing alone in a corner of London in which she is an interloper, a trespasser.
Iona knocks again. She listens inside and holds her breath. She finally hears footsteps, and a cat miaows in some corner of the flat on the other side of the door. A middle-aged man with a moustache opens the door, accompanying the pungent odour of Middle Eastern food. He looks Turkish or Lebanese, like many of the locals here.
“Yes?” He stares at her, leaning on the half-opened door.
“Hi … I am … I am looking for a Chinese woman at this address,” Iona says nervously. “Her name is Mu, Deng Mu.”
“A Chinese woman?” The man’s voice softens a little; he lets the door open a little wider. “Who are you?”
Who am I? Iona mutters the same question at the back of her throat.
“I am … her friend. My name is Iona.”
“She has just gone back to China. Didn’t she tell you?” The man puts his full weight against the open door and it makes an ominous creak.
“Right … I didn’t know.”
“She left two days ago.”
“So she does live here? Deng Mu?”
“Yes, the Chinese woman with long black hair, works for a shipping company in China—do you mean her? She’s just with us temporarily—our lodger.”
The cat miaows again somewhere in the kitchen. Then the animal saunters out, a black cat with sparkling green eyes, and weaves itself in between its owner’s legs.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
The foreign man shakes his head.
“Right. Thanks …” A pause. Iona asks with uneasiness: “Has she ever talked about another friend—a Chinese man. I thought she might be living with him.”
The foreign man scans Iona up and down with increased suspicion. Still holding the door ajar, he nevertheless seems friendly. “No. There’s no one else here. Just me and my wife.”
A woman’s voice in the flat calls the foreign man in a language Iona doesn’t recognise.
He turns his head and shouts back an incomprehensible sentence.
Iona feels it’s the moment to leave.
“Thanks, I’ll contact her when she’s back.”
The foreign man nods his head, closing the door. Iona waves her hands, squeezing out a polite smile.
Now standing in the courtyard among chained bicycles and rubbish bins, Iona looks up once again at the third floor, the green door and the windows of flat number 35. She notices there is a wilted plant sitting by the window. A strange emptiness fills her. The world seems to fade out around her, leaving her bare and alone on a deserted square.
As she walks back down the concrete steps, more slowly and with none of the adrenaline-rush excitement she had on the way up, she thinks of Jonathan. She tries to turn away from him, this married man, but she cannot remove his image, or expunge the feeling that fills her body like dye staining a still pool. “I’m thinking of shelving the project.” That’s how he refused her, in his way, both on a professional and a personal level. Now she is not even useful for the project. This is what it’s like to be expelled from the kingdom once and for all, she thinks. Though this will never be acknowledged except by her, with a mute bitterness too vague to be given words. He is probably oblivious to her now, back at home after work, making dinner with his wife of twenty years, his kids jumping around his knees, adoring their father-idol and asking him for all the things a daddy is supposed to do and give; and he is probably discreetly planning to publish someone else’s biography, Gaddafi’s, Castro’s or Putin’s, or some other big shot. Such a picture of domestic perfection and professional success appears before Iona in the twilight, with the damp beginning to send its cold fingers crawling over h
er shivering skin.
Iona sits on a bench in the courtyard of Thistle House for a while, until an African family comes by, two small kids showering each other with playful blows. When the kids spot her, they stare at her as if they know she is some sort of spy, someone who doesn’t belong to this building or this dark-skinned community. Iona turns and leaves the courtyard. On the way back, she passes an old Chinese man. Thin and short, he is carrying a Tesco shopping bag in each hand; she turns her head, watching his bent frame disappear into a side street, against the hard glow of the street lamps, turned on early on this winter afternoon.
4 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013
Why are there no songs in my head any more? Like Rimbaud in Africa who gave up poetry for gun running. Like the Misty Poet Hai Zi who decided to leave the world behind, lying on a railway track. And I’ve lost the need for music. Or maybe it’s that the music doesn’t need me any more.
A phrase from Dante came to me earlier: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Am I entering Hell? Is this blue sea Hell, the Circles of Hell under this white sun?
The diary Jian is writing now he will never post to Mu. Nor will Jonathan or Iona read these words until it is much too late. As he scribbles on the white page, sunlight burns his eyes. The sunny hours feel longer here than Jian’s days in England and France. Time stretches and slows down, like the shadows of the poplar trees lingering forever on sun-bleached walls and facades. The sun is frozen on the olive groves and cypress branches. Like some aged horse, the bus travels slowly from Iraklio to Rethymno. There are very few passengers. A sense of self-abandonment wraps around the single Chinese man, it dissipates into the thin air of this island, becoming the very air he breathes into his lungs. No one is in a hurry on the bus; it is as if the bus itself knows there’s nothing to hurry for, nothing waiting at the end of the line. Just another evening, another night, another day. Just the shadows projecting shapes from a slightly different angle of the sun.
As far as Jian can see, this Greek island is no poorer or richer than anywhere else he has been. Dark-skinned old men walk around under the low winter sun, or sit and contemplate. One wonders how much influence the outside world has on the locals. Picking olives from the same olive tree, walking the same hills their ancestors walked—does the outside world really affect their day-to-day life? Jian still remembers those lines from Confucius’s Book of Odes: “We get up at sunrise, at sunset we rest. We dig wells and drink, we plough the fields and eat, what is the might of the emperor to us?” If the old sayings are right, does that mean all his struggles are pointless, even foolish?
Jian tries to think clearly, but he is too tired to think. He closes his eyes, drifting into sleep. In his folded arms lies the third volume of Life and Fate; he is on the very last section. The book has grown mouldy, the cover has crumbled and fallen off, and the Chinese title has become unrecognisable.
5 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013
Crete is in the middle of the Mediterranean, but for Jian it feels like a forgotten island adrift from the world. He remembers being stuck in the detention centre, reading about Napoleon and the island of St. Helena. The memory disturbs him and he tries to stop himself thinking. Here, too, the weather is extreme. Rainstorms arrive after a hot morning, raindrops like a vast wet curtain sweeping through the island, blasting the yachts and the pine trees and every living creature on the land. Occasionally, children swim in the bay with water-wings on their arms, but they are called back by their parents when the rain starts. Cars drive away from the beach, ferries leave. Nature knows well how to scare the humans away.
Living on a boat is not a long-term plan, but so far this is all he has found. It looks like the boat has been abandoned: spiderwebs crisscross the ceiling of the cabin and knot in every corner. Reeds grow wild all around. It’s a very old sailing boat, all broken down. Inside, the living space has a narrow built-in bed and resembles the sleeper compartment of a train. Lying on the bed, hearing the sea lapping right beside the boat, Jian feels fine and safe. There’s little chance that someone will come to arrest him or accuse him of stealing their property, but he’s not planning on staying long anyway.
Hidden inside the boat, beside the ravaged pages of his Russian novel, is Jian’s journal. It is his sole companion.
So many people died in Volumes One and Two that when we come to Volume Three the dead are no longer mentioned—the Russian soldiers, German soldiers, the people of Stalingrad, the Jews in the gas chambers, the sons and the daughters and the mothers and the commissars, let alone everyone starving on the collective farms. I wonder how many Chinese men and women have read this book; it would be devastating for the Chinese: the true sorrow is that the hero loses his faith. In the end he cannot believe in either communism or nationalism; the people in the book are left alone without belief and without their loved ones. Do ideologies die as people die? I hope so, for the sake of peace.
So hear me, this is my confession: ideology is a slaughterhouse. And I have been living in this slaughterhouse from the very beginning.
In years to come the old Greeks on this island will be gone, just as the old Chinese will disappear, the old French, the old English, and the old Germans … all of them will die out. Humans will be no longer. Only the sea will ta ma de senselessly stay.
Jian falls asleep. For hours he doesn’t move, not even to wave away the last of the summer mosquitoes or scratch himself. It is as if he were already dead. The storm lingers, wrapping itself around the island, the forest, the town. Jian wakes up, shivering with cold, completely soaked, the boat filled with water. Later he finds some plastic sheeting to cover the boat, and he bails out the water with a bucket.
In the middle of the night, the rain and wind subside. There is no cry from the seagulls, no human voices from the shore, not even a dog barking. Every living being seems to have been scared off by nature’s ire. Under a moon slipping into the west, Jian thinks of those Communist officials in Life and Fate—how familiar they appear to him! He sees his father as being in the mould of the true Stalinist. He sees how the man has always held on to some cruel weapon or other, snatching power, terminating those who have threatened him, even his wife and his son, in order to build his empire.
6 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013
In a nearby village, an old couple seem to be the only people who can be bothered to talk to Jian. Perhaps it’s because he mentioned that he used to live in Grantham and the couple are English. Slough is the town where they were both born, but is not the place they have planned to die. There is Hugh, who is about eighty, and his wife, Rosemary, a few years younger. They moved to Greece fifteen years ago when they retired. They weren’t rich, but they had enough money to buy a modest house with a big garden. Hugh was in the RAF for nearly twenty years, he says. He tells Jian that he used to smuggle diamonds and gold from Angola when he served as a pilot. It was Angola, the gold country, which burnt his skin, but also seared its way into his heart. Hugh says he made a lot of money, but then lost everything a few years later: risky investments with dubious bankers and investors. Still, his face now seems serene, if somewhat wizened. A wry smile crackles under the mahogany-coloured skin and lined cheeks. Rosemary likes to offer the Chinese man her lemon cheesecake, or fruit cakes made with fruits from the garden. She is proud of their little plot. But in Jian’s eyes, her pride is too light—built as it is on almost nothing: just the ownership of a lone English-speaking house on an isolated Greek island.
Still, life goes on, at least for some people. Each morning Hugh walks his two dogs, and then swims in the afternoon, even in winter when it is not too windy, his brown body like a naked Don Quixote’s. His wife moves her old skeleton about, white beneath paper-brown skin, tending her courgettes and tomatoes. Then she’ll gaze onto the beach from the garden, listening to the BBC in the shade. “The sea is too rough for me now,” Rosemary says to Jian, “but I used to be a good swimmer, I used to swim in the river and the boys would stand by the bank, impressed by their old mum.” Rosemary has this t
ypical educated Englishwoman’s composure; she looks like a white colonial landowner in Kenya, spry and graceful but sharp as a knife, ruling her sun-baked farmhouse.
“You don’t miss your country?” Jian asks in his humble English.
“No, Jian. Thank the Lord, Hugh and I don’t need to stay in miserable cold England any more,” Rosemary says, her eyebrows moving very slightly. “What about you? Do you miss China?”
“Yes—” He stops there. There is too much to say.
“Then you should go back.” Hearing no response, she continues. “Are you visiting Europe for a short time, or are you planning on staying?”
“I don’t really know,” Jian answers, with some difficulty.
He gazes at Rosemary’s garden, thinks of the effort she puts into this small vegetable patch—every day watering it under the hard relentless sun, maintaining the well-structured grape vines, the tomato plants and red peppers, weeding the herb patch, repairing the shed, painting the stone walls. Does gardening make her feel rooted to this place? That this might be home? He thinks of the peasant farms on the outskirts of Beijing. The labour is much harder there, but the great care that is taken, mixing human intention with earth and water, is the same. The idea of working on their soil brings forth fruit from the ground; the idea also roots the people to their land.
“You remind me of my youngest son, Matt. He’s a musician. His career has taken him to many exciting places. Now he’s gone to Japan, the farthest place he could go! Well, you’re still young, Jian, you’ve got plenty of time to wander around and find what you have to find. I would do the same if I were young.” Rosemary pours Jian some tea. “Would you like another piece of cake? It’s rather good, even though I say so myself.”
Jian shakes his head gently. His throat is knotted. His head is heavy. The English lady enters her kitchen and fetches something. Moments later, she hands Jian a small plastic bag. “Chocolate shortbread. I baked it yesterday.”