I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  Jian wants to embrace Rosemary. But his body is stiff, as if the wind had frozen his limbs in one position. His brain is telling his arms to move to her, but despite all his efforts only his fingertips manage to touch her sleeve. Ever so lightly, he pinches the soft fabric of the old lady’s blouse. No words come. Rosemary is looking at him sympathetically, barely breathing. Pausing as if time itself had thickened, pouring more slowly through their veins.

  Later he finds himself walking slowly back to his boat. It’s quite a long walk, especially as he has chosen to pick his way along the heavy, waterlogged beach. As his sandals move through white sand and lapping water, he realises that a melody from an old song is looping in his mind. It’s one of his. He wonders why it has come to him now, out of nowhere, like a homing pigeon flying to its master, who has long thought it dead, or has forgotten it entirely. They’re lines he wrote long ago, in college. Lines he wrote for someone called Mu. “Yellow Dust on Your Black Hair”—that was the title and the first line. It’s like a dream; almost a dream of a dream. He sees the character of her name: , and a face somehow merging with the character, covering it, like the gossamer threads of a spiderweb. The lyrics of the song seem to speak to the moon-shaped face, and through the character he seems to clasp the face close to him.

  He looks up at the cliffs, the headland falling into the sea. A small pine and some daisies cling to the top of the cliff. The wind is trying to uproot them, but the pine and the daisies cling on. Maybe it’s time to let this homing bird fly away, Jian thinks … And just as it comes, it leaves. Now there is only the sound of the ocean swell, and the bubbling cadence of pebbles. Then nothing.

  No salt tears join the salt-sea’s wave. No knotted heart finds its place in the knotted cliffs. No inner cry. Nothing.

  7 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

  The sand is covering Jian’s ankles. It’s so dry that it seems to him the world is transforming itself into a desert. And that will be the end of civilisation. Everything will return to sandy wastes and salty seas. Barrenness eternal. The world just one great salty ocean, its only life the wind-dragged waves and roving clouds.

  He pauses in the middle of the road and lifts a broken sandal, rubbing away the small stones from between his toes. He makes his way forward, step by step, but something still hurts. A spine has pierced the rough skin of his big toe. He looks down and sees a small crushed cactus, its cylindrical trunk bristling with spines—like a tiny landmine waiting to destroy its enemies. He kneels down and tries to pluck the barb from his toe. The little bastard doesn’t want to come. Maybe it wants to sprout anew inside me, he thinks, colonise me. Damn these thorns! Swearing, Jian walks through the little cactus patch tentatively. He knows that the power of the sea is stronger than the power of the desert plants. The sea will wash them away in the end—roots, spines, seeds, as well as all other land-dwelling life. All will be washed away, all. Then the sharks and whales, the jellyfish and squid, the sea slugs and the sea urchins will feed on the land-dwelling creatures that float now in the body of the sea. All will be consumed in that boundless blue water. Nobody, nothing, will escape the final reckoning, the whirlpool sucking in and dissolving all the forms of nature.

  He continues to walk, slowly, towards Hugh and Rosemary’s house. It seems such a long way today, as if the house had been pushed further along the desert road each day by an enormous powerful hand. Maybe he is just exhausted, he tells himself, from hunger, from lack of water, or from the dry, unforgiving heat. His steps are heavy and his head groggy. The Mediterranean afternoon is an endlessly static afterglow stretched forever on the deserted beach like a burning rainbow. Apart from the occasional dog barking, there is not a single soul around to disturb his solitude.

  In the early evening, Jian arrives at his neighbours’ house. Hugh is out with the dogs. Rosemary is descaling a big sea bream she has just got from the village market. In the living room the TV is on. The BBC is reporting the news from Parliament; and now, how Manchester is going to build the world’s biggest stadium. The familiar sound of English television enters Jian’s ears and moves into deeper parts of his brain. The old couple don’t seem particularly reflective. They look like they’ve signed a good contract with their shared fate, and now all they have do is take time and enjoy each moment as it comes.

  “One day you’ll get married and have children. Then you’ll understand,” says Rosemary. “Hugh and I have been married for nearly fifty years, and we’ve been up and down all the way through, but we coped with it all. Now the kids look after themselves. Our children and grandchildren are coming to stay for Christmas. You come over too if you like. All right?”

  Jian listens in silence. Children and grandchildren and Christmas, these subjects sound so remote. He can’t picture himself sitting at an old polished dinner table wiping his grandson’s dripping mouth while his wife washes dishes in the background or hoovers the carpet in the living room where Christmas songs are playing. He is Chinese, he doesn’t even worship Laozi or Confucius! Plus his ancestors are the Mongols. What does Christmas mean to a Mongol Chinese? He would worship green grass under the blue sky if he had to worship something. No, Jian can’t put himself inside this Christmas picture.

  Rosemary slows down. “But here I am, still alive and walking on this warm beach! Life is a blessing.”

  Life is a blessing? Jian wonders.

  The old lady washes her scale-covered hands. Although wrinkled and skinny, her hands are muscular, like her face. “I don’t suppose you know what war is like, Jian, you’re too young. Now Hugh and I can live the way we want. It’s a pay-off, I would say.”

  Rosemary walks to the front garden, checking if her husband is back from the beach with the dogs.

  “What about you, Jian, do you have someone you’d like to be with for Christmas?” Rosemary looks into his eyes. “She’s in China, I suppose?”

  Jian nods his head, and then shakes it. “We separated a while ago,” he answers in a hoarse and effortful voice. He has almost forgotten how to speak.

  “Oh, dear …” Rosemary doesn’t press him.

  “She was called Mu.” A pause, and Jian adds: “It means tree.”

  He looks at the sea in the distance, the ever-lasting blue energy. He doesn’t really want to talk; he has barely talked in the last few months. Now Mu’s moon-shaped face appears, and his toe hurts again. He kneels down, poking his damaged toe out of the top of his sandal, and tries once more to pluck out the spine.

  Rosemary fetches her glasses and a pair of tweezers. She bends her frail body down to Jian’s toes. Her hair is close to his face, grey yet soft, thinning in the middle but well combed, dignified, and with the fragrance of lavender. He wants to touch her hair, yet he refrains. The smell of Rosemary’s hair sends him a warm and inexplicable sadness, and to a memory he has kept so long, kept only for himself, that of a black-haired girl, her hair and body smelling of the gardenia-scented soap she liked to use. That familiar yet so far away silky skin, the small and bony hands which belonged to her. Mu. The sound of her name and the image of her moon face make Jian lose his words in front of this English lady.

  8 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

  The strangest dream I’ve ever had. This morning I dreamed I was Pangu, the first creature in the universe. I, Pangu, had been in a cosmic egg for 20,000 years, then one day I broke out of my shell, I looked around and set about the task of creating the world: I separated yin from yang with a swing of my giant axe. I wanted to separate the earth from the sky. But the earth and sky had been stuck together for so many thousands of years that it was very difficult to separate them. I took a deep breath, and stood between them and pushed up the sky. The old bastard sky! So heavy and tough! This task took me some thousand years, the sky each day growing ten feet higher, the earth ten feet wider, and I ten feet taller. I stood there pushing the bastard sky for so long that the animals started to gather together to help me. The four most prominent animals—turtle, phoenix, qilin and dragon—helped to raise the sky with
their powerful backs and tails and claws. After several thousand more years, the animals had evaporated into invisible spirits, and I was exhausted. I lay down to rest. Days and nights passed and my breath became the wind, my voice the thunder, my left eye the sun and my right eye the moon; my body became the mountains; my blood formed rivers; my muscles the fertile lands; my beard the stars and the Milky Way; my fur the bushes and forests; my bones the valuable minerals; my sweat fell as rain; and the fleas on my fur became fish and the animals of the land. I, Pangu, became this universe. Then I disappeared, in an ethereal but immense form.

  * * *

  A small figure walks upon the sand dunes. Everything around him is still, but he walks aimlessly with no clear direction in sight, on and on. At one point he enters a village he has never been to before. He passes each house, looking over the white, low stone walls at their gardens. The walls are decayed and the paint on the windowpanes is faded and peeling. Then he is back on the bumpy country road again; occasionally he encounters an old widow dressed in black, staggering towards the village market. They must be going there to buy bread and onions, he muses. People try to get by, until the last day comes.

  It is dark now. Someone by the shore is playing a ukulele, broken tunes with something of a Japanese mood. When the wind comes, the music is taken and dissolves into the ether. The moon is full. The waves lick the rocks at the water’s edge.

  At midnight, after a whole day’s wandering, Jian returns to his boat. He finds an orange on his narrow bed. A blood orange—Tarocco or Sanguinello, as they call it. It is fresh, and still almost warm from the heat of the day’s sun. Has someone been here? Did someone leave him the fruit on purpose? Or was it Pangu who visited him? He can’t think any more. Slowly, he peels the orange and the red juice spills from the flesh. He drinks the juice, leaving the pith and peel beside his bed.

  The last page of Life and Fate. I should have stopped reading on the previous page, then I could have gone back and started again. I wish there was never a “last page.” But this is it. I’ve lived with the Shaposhnikov family for centuries, and I know everybody’s story by heart, Viktor’s, Krymov’s, Karimov’s, Chernetsov’s, Abarchuk’s, David’s, Mostovskoy’s, Lyudmila’s … endless pages of human struggle and defeat. “There was a deeper sadness in this silence than in the silence of autumn. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself,” Jian reads. Yes, the spring will come if you ever get through the long winter, he thinks. But Grossman knows only too well that death runs faster than humans, death snatches our hope long before spring arrives.

  9 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

  When the plane touches down at Heraklion International Airport in Crete, Iona feels exhausted. She booked the early-morning flight and her head aches from lack of sleep. This was not a planned trip, she bought the ticket on the spur of the moment in a travel agency the day before, the cheapest she could get. She’s brought almost no luggage with her. Apart from her daily necessary things in her backpack, she has only a jacket, jeans, two T-shirts and Vasily Grossman’s novel. She feels liberated.

  The airport feels a little desolate; it is winter, not a good season for tourism. She buys a local map from an old Greek woman at the tourist office. Holding the map awkwardly, she impulsively jumps on a tourist bus waiting in front of the airport. She has no accommodation booked and no plans. Under the clear Mediterranean sunlight, she moves along the dry, mountainous landscape.

  She gets off the bus with two young backpackers at the second stop. It is on the way to the Iraklio area. There are a few shops along the street ahead and a hotel named Kazantzakis Inn. She walks into the hotel lobby and asks the price of a room.

  The afternoon idles away through Iona’s tired and lonesome eyes. Although sunny, it is very windy and not warm at all. Winter seems to be the same old cold everywhere in the northern hemisphere, even on this sunlit Greek island. She wanders about by the harbour, on the beach, and in those small streets where they sell different editions of Nikos Kazantzakis’s famous novel Zorba the Greek. Everywhere she goes, she imagines Jian might have once sat: here and there, in that cafe, on this low wall, hungry and weary, scribbling words in his diary. Or even—perhaps, he is still here somewhere on the island. Iona feels she should conduct her investigation properly: stay for a good few weeks; travel to the west coast of the island; talk to locals; walk along the rocks by the seashore. Then she may find her Jian.

  When evening arrives, Iona drops her tired body on a chair at an empty beach bar. On the counter a TV is showing footage of a national football game and two sluggish waiters loaf around, half asleep. She sits outside on the terrace, slowly drinking a bottle of beer called Mythos. It doesn’t taste bad, better than most English ale she’s drunk in pubs at home. Her empty eyes scan the empty streets under the evening street lights, looking for a Chinese figure. The sky is dark above her, black and golden clouds drift by. Gradually stars invade the boundless space.

  The next morning Iona wakes early in her small hotel room, rested and eager. Pulling back the curtain, she opens the window, breathing in the salty sea. Ah, this is Crete; as Jian said, the sea here is the purest and bluest! As the sunlight burns into her retina, she feels fresh and energised. She comes down to the lobby where the hotel serves breakfast with her hair still wet from her shower. She picks up a bilingual local newspaper called Expat Crete, and drinks a glass of orange juice as she casually reads. Well, even if I gain nothing on this island, even if I find nothing, still, I will have just given myself a special holiday. She tells herself: why not just enjoy it? She flips the newspaper pages as she sips her coffee. The paper is not very exciting, mainly notices about forthcoming local festivities, hotel adverts and the mention of cruise trips and island-hopping for Christmas. Then on page 3, she spots this:

  Crete West Coast Police report:

  At 5:18 p.m. on 15 November, a local fisherman in Rethymno and his grandson discovered a body washed up on the shore near their fishing hut. The man, who likely drowned, may have been dead for up to twenty-four hours, the autopsy yesterday confirmed.

  The victim is an Asian male said to be in his late thirties. Police are yet to release the name of the dead man. The fisherman told our reporter: “I found a green army bag behind a bush while I was drying my net on the rocks.” Police confirm that the bag contained a ten-euro note, a Chinese passport, a French health insurance card and a diary written in Chinese. The fisherman added, “At first I thought maybe someone had gone for a swim and hidden his belongings in the bushes. But there were no clothes or shoes around. Later that evening I saw a body being washed onto the shore.”

  The fisherman, who is first-aid trained, claimed that he and his grandson pulled the body out of the water and that chest compressions were performed. Medical staff confirmed the man was dead on arrival. Further details will be released by police once family have been found and informed.

  What? Iona reads the first line again: At 5:18 p.m. on 15 November? Yesterday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon when she was sitting in this lonely terrace cafe by the sea, looking at the snow-capped mountains while drinking a Mythos beer. The victim is an Asian male. He was drowned only some hours before Iona wandered around the island, or probably he was sinking down while she switched off the lamp in Kazantzakis Inn. She scans the article again: … a ten-euro note, a Chinese passport, a French health insurance card and a diary written in Chinese …

  It cannot be! Oh fuck. Iona puts down her piece of toast, pushes away the pot of mango and strawberry jam, her plate, her coffee. Grabbing the newspaper, she stands up and rushes out of the hotel.

  10 CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

  Two and an half hours later, Iona jumps off a bus in Rethymno, and finds herself at the Crete West Coast Police Station.

  “What’s your relation to the victim?” the female police officer asks her in English with a heavy Greek accent.

  Her young male colleague squints at Iona from time to time as he takes notes.


  “Well, I’m his friend. But—look. Um, first—has the body been identified? I need to know. Can I have a look at his passport?—then I can be sure if he’s someone I know …” Iona mutters, still holding the torn page of the newspaper she took from her hotel this morning.

  There are no systems or rules here, it seems. The officer behind the desk is completely uninterested in Iona backing up her claims to be the victim’s friend. Instead she opens her desk drawer, and throws an old passport onto the table in front of her. A People’s Republic of China Passport. Oh God, Iona thinks.

  She opens it at the identification details section:

  Surname: Jian

  Given name: Kublai

  Birth date: 10 November 1972

  Birth place: Beijing, China

  Then the face of a Chinese man, a man whom Iona has imagined hundreds of times—Kublai Jian with his eyes uncovered. There is something indefinable in those dark eyes under his straight, thick eyebrows.

  “So, is he someone you know?” the female officer asks, taking back the passport.

  “Yes. I am his … his translator, you could say …” Iona feels her heart beating fast, and she is shaky and sweating. She needs a glass of water, or perhaps something to eat, to calm her down.

  “You are his translator … Yeah. OK, right … and where do you live?” The officer’s tone is monotonous. She has a form and a pen poised to take down details. She tilts her head to the side, waiting.

  “I live in London, and I’m working on the translations—” Iona is about to say more but realises that it just doesn’t matter. This policewoman doesn’t care who Jian was and what her connection to him is. It’s all procedure. Iona says, “He is, or was, a musician.”