Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  Cai Fang had a chauffeur-driven car that was available to him for private errands, but today he’d elected to hail a taxi, both for the trip to the airport and now for the ride to Beijing Station. Aki had come with a sturdy black medium-sized suitcase, but Cai had only a vinyl shoulder bag.

  They sped along a straight, poplar-lined road. Snowflakes drifted down in the grey twilight. Whenever he landed at Beijing Airport, Aki took the big neon sign at the Panasonic factory as the start of downtown. Now he barely had time to register its presence on the left before the Beijing sky – a sky he was seeing for the first time in seven years – was overtaken by a darkness filled with swirling snow.

  The station crowds were never less than unnerving, but with the holiday rush for the Lunar New Year, confusion was approaching panic level. Fifty or sixty thousand people swarmed in the station plaza, their commotion a loud droning in Aki’s ears as Cai’s bulky figure plunged through the crowd ahead of him.

  In front of the station building they came to a sturdy-looking iron fence: the first checkpoint. Their tickets were examined and they proceeded into the hall, where ahead of them rose a long escalator. Pushed along from behind, they were carried in a sort of tidal bore to the second-floor hall. This central concourse was vast and dimly lit, with waiting rooms on either side divided according to platform.

  They located their assigned waiting room, but the benches were full. The air was full of gritty, throat-stinging cigarette smoke, and a resinous smell overlay everything. Aki put his suitcase down by the wall. Cai handed him his ticket.

  They were due to take train 2519, bound for Yuncheng, leaving at 21:10. Along the way they would pass through Shijiazhuang, Yangquan, and Taiyuan, heading south down the middle of the vast Loess Plateau and arriving at their destination of Linfen at 10:23 the following morning. Aki checked his watch against the wall clock in the waiting room. Nearly two hours till departure time.

  “I brought supper,” said Cai, tapping his shoulder bag. “There is a dining car, but the food’s inedible. I ordered sandwiches from the restaurant at the Great Wall Hotel. Should be plenty.”

  “Good. Thanks. Why don’t I get some fruit to go with it?”

  “No need. Don’t worry about a thing. See, I have wine, too.” Cai showed him the neck of a bottle poking out of the bag. “Besides us, there’ll be two other passengers in the sleeping compartment, so we won’t be able to talk very much. It’s safer to talk here. Let’s say everything that needs saying, and get that out of the way.”

  “I suppose because of the suitcase, it wouldn’t do to walk and talk.”

  “We’ll be okay here.” Cai Fang twisted his large frame around to survey the surrounding hubbub. “All right,” he began, “here’s the story:

  “In 1979 Han Langen was released from Qincheng Prison in Beijing and sent to three different jails before ending up in the jail in Linfen City, in Shanxi Province. Then in August 1989, around the time you were taken into custody in Shanghai—”

  Here Cai Fang broke off and chuckled mischievously, to which Aki responded with a grin.

  “– he was let out and sent to a village on the outskirts of Linfen called Zhaonanhe. The village has no jail. He’s not paroled, but he is able to live a fairly normal life there and have a personal registry. It’s a form of exile. Sometimes when a prisoner’s term is over, instead of setting him free they’ll detain him in this way. You can marry, you can have your own home, you can even send for your family to come live with you.

  “Still, it’s a mystery: why on earth your father was called back, arrested for espionage in Beijing, and kept locked up all this time – I’ve checked into it as far as I can, but there’s no paper trail. To say records were lost in the storms of the Cultural Revolution is the usual excuse; it’s also possible that someone deliberately destroyed the papers. Anyway, here’s my advice: remind yourself that this is a country with a history of burning books and burying scholars alive, and overlook what may or may not have happened this time.”

  Aki nodded. The lighting was dim to begin with, the air such a swirl of dust and cigarette smoke that he had trouble seeing Cai’s face clearly.

  “I’m not particularly set on digging up the truth,” he said. “It’s just that if there’s any chance my father is alive, I can’t sit around and do nothing. I may live elsewhere, but so long as he and I both have our feet on this earth, as his son I want to walk up to him and say something.”

  Cai nodded several times. “I understand. But I’d advise against trying to take him away with you. That would be a problem, and lead to other complications.”

  “I’m sure it would. I have no intention of doing any such thing. To tell the truth, I’m more worried about you.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “There isn’t much time.”

  “Don’t worry. Actually I brought my plans forward one day. I’d originally planned to take the noon train tomorrow – but I wanted to see you again.”

  “And I wanted to see you. I really wanted to see you and thank you in person. Li Xing sends her regards. She said to tell you how grateful she is for all you did.”

  “It makes me happy to hear that. She’s a wonderful woman. I envy you.”

  Aki was touched by this. “I’ll tell her exactly what you said. Also, Xu Liping sends his warmest regards.”

  Cai Fang bowed and then, murmuring “this calls for a drink,” shoved his way through the waiting-room crowd and disappeared. He was soon back with some not-very-chilled cans of beer. He handed one to Aki. When they popped them open, foam bubbled out. “Kampai,” they said softly, raising a toast.

  “Beijing Station is great,” Aki decided, casting his eyes around. “You can feel the excitement in the air, people setting off for distant places. Tokyo Station is dead by comparison. Japanese people were probably like this in the old days, but the bullet train wrecked everything.”

  “There used to be a bar in Tokyo Station called Camellia. Is it still there?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I told Zhang Liang about it.”

  “I know. I went drinking with him there.”

  “Is that right? I’m fond of that station, I really am. It’s a good one. The first time I came to Beijing was to enrol at the university. Seventy-two hours by train from Urumqi, in blazing midsummer heat, like an insect crawling across the face of the earth.”

  “How far is that in kilometres?”

  Cai pulled a railway timetable out of his bag. With practiced ease, he thumbed quickly to the table of distances. “Beijing to Urumqi… here it is, 3,774 kilometres. That’s the longest distance listed. Beijing to Kunming is 3,279 kilometres.”

  Intrigued, Aki peered at the table, too.

  “And the next longest?”

  “Pingxiang – 2,785 kilometres.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s on the border with Vietnam, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Guiyang, 2,540 kilometres. How far is it from Tokyo to Kagoshima?”

  “I don’t know, maybe 1,600 kilometres?”

  Just then, all twelve or thirteen hundred people in the waiting room stood up en masse, with a noise like the rumbling of an earthquake. The ticket gate was open. A wave of baggage-laden passengers surged forwards from the rear of the room, carrying Aki and Cai Fang along with them.

  They crossed a dark overpass and descended to a still darker platform. Snow blew in their faces. At the step leading up into the train was the third checkpoint. For the first time, it struck Aki that in this country the people who examined your ticket were invariably women. Gruff women.

  Finally they arrived in their compartment. Two sets of bunks, four beds in all. No ladder for climbing to the upper bunk; you had to put one foot on a small footstool near the door, grab the railing, and hoist yourself up. This meant pulling up your entire weight with your arms, which was clearly beyond Cai’s ability, so Aki decided he would sleep on top. Going
to the john in the night would be not be fun, better not drink much.

  One of the passengers who would be sharing the compartment came in: a middle-aged man carrying a cheap-looking attaché case.

  “How far are you going?” asked Cai.

  “Pingyao. You two?”

  “Linfen.”

  A young woman rolled a big suitcase into the compartment and greeted them with a cheery “Ni hao!”

  “Ni hao.”

  She had healthy, glowing skin. There was a bandage around her left wrist.

  “How far are you going?” asked the man with the attaché case.

  “Yuncheng.”

  “Ah, the end of the line.”

  A bell and a whistle sounded shrilly at the same time, and with a great clanging, the train lurched into motion. On the windowpane, snowflakes melted and ran down in oblique lines, beyond which were the blurred and desolate-looking lights of Beijing.

  The train seemed to pant for breath as it moved. Heading west, it climbed a fairly steep slope.

  The man with the attaché case was Cao. He worked for a travel company in Beijing and was on his way to a branch office in Pingyao, where the train was due to arrive at around 7:30 a.m. The young woman worked at a foreign-owned hotel in Beijing and was going home for the Lunar New Year.

  The numbers on their tickets indicated that the girl had the lower bunk and Cao the upper, but as he was getting off first, they traded places. Declining the young woman’s offer of sunflower seeds, Cai and Aki made a late supper of their sandwiches, which they shared with the other two. They uncorked the wine, but Aki restricted himself to a mouthful, and Cai and Cao finished it off between them. The young woman nibbled on sunflower seeds nonstop. She would hold one vertically between her teeth and crack it open, then deftly remove the contents with her tongue and spit out the shell into a plastic bag.

  When Cao began nodding off, the group took advantage of his sleepiness to bid one another goodnight. Up in her bunk, the girl continued to nibble on seeds while reading a magazine. Cao began to snore laboriously.

  Aki and Cai went out into the corridor for a smoke. Though Cai’s bulk left no space for anyone else to get by, he didn’t seem to care. Outside the windows all was pitch dark, making it impossible to say for certain what direction the train was moving in. Occasionally the sound of a whistle would approach, and a long succession of container cars would pass, ending with a boxcar and, in its window, the face of a man in the regulation cap. Orange taillights receded into the distance along with the whistle.

  “Where in God’s name is this?” murmured Aki.

  Cai rubbed the steam from the windowpane with his palm and stuck his nose close to the glass, cupping his hands around his face to block out the light in the corridor.

  “Let’s see – we were in Baoding before.”

  “What time do you think we’ll get to Yangquan?”

  “Yangquan? Maybe three in the morning. That’s right, Yangquan was Li Xing’s second home, wasn’t it?”

  Her parents and nainai were buried there. She would probably never go there again. The least he could do was stay awake as the train passed through.

  “Of course. She’ll ask if the train went there. You can hardly tell her you were asleep.”

  “No, I can’t. It’s a little thing, but there you are.”

  “Not little at all. Stay up. Yes, you should absolutely stay up. I’ll keep you company. You can tell her I was awake, too. Next is Shijiazhuang. It’s another four hours till Yangquan.”

  Once again Cai put his head against the window, his hands framing his face as he looked out.

  “See anything?” asked Aki.

  “Yes, rails. They’re coming closer. We’re going to join up. There, they’ve merged.”

  The train swayed as the two sets of tracks came together.

  “Excuse me,” said a passenger, finding the corridor blocked. It was a plump young man with a moustache.

  Cai Fang didn’t budge. “Now there’s a pond,” he said. “Swans are swimming in it.”

  Surprised, Aki pressed his forehead against the window, cupping his face with his hands. The vibration and chill of the glass felt good. The pond passed. It must have been frozen. But how could swans swim on ice?

  “There’s an elephant in the pond,” said Cai.

  Incredulous now, Aki narrowed his eyes and stared. For an instant, suspended in the dark void he saw the figure of an elephant, trunk raised high like a periscope. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Is this train going through a zoo?”

  “Yes. Look over there, a qilin is running over the hill.”

  “Which, a giraffe or a real qilin?”

  “A qilin, naturally.”

  Aki saw the animal gallop through a clump of grass on the slope. Cai’s voice was saying, “Body of a deer, tail of an ox, a single horn on its head. The male is called qi and the female, lin. It’s considered a benign creature as it never tramples on grass, never tramples on animals, never so much as bends any vegetation.”

  The young man who had asked to get by, and had been standing fidgeting in the aisle all this time, now did as they did, bringing his face up close to the window and peering out.

  “Nothing to see out there,” he growled.

  “He and I can see it,” said Cai. Then to Aki he said, “Well, shall we turn in?”

  They re-entered the compartment. Cao was fast asleep, snoring softly now.

  “I’ll wake you when we get to Yangquan,” said Cai, tapping his wide chest. Reassured, Aki climbed up to his bunk. In the darkness behind the curtain of the other upper bunk, the muffled sound of sunflower seeds being cracked open went on and on. It was already after one in the morning. Not everyone would be able to sleep soundly, he thought. The bird-feed noises were going to drive him crazy.

  There wasn’t enough room to change into pyjamas. He removed his jacket, lay face up with the blanket pulled up to his chin and, turning on the bedside lamp, opened an English paperback. It was Paul Theroux’s account of his travels through China, which he’d purchased at a kiosk in Narita. The epigraph read:

  A peasant must stand a long time on

  a hillside with his mouth open before a

  roast duck flies in.

  —Chinese proverb

  The movements which work revolutions in

  the world are borne out of the dreams and visions

  in a peasant’s heart on a hillside.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  This is good stuff, he mumbled to himself.

  In April 1986, Theroux had left London and travelled to China on a succession of eight different trains. Ulan Bator, Harbin, Beijing, Qingdao, Amoy, Xining, Urumqi… It seemed as if he’d ridden every long-distance train possible, but this train to Yuncheng, number 2519, was not among them.

  Aki read on until he came to this passage:

  In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person – or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape there was a person in it staring back at me.

  This brought on thoughts of his father. A figure standing on a hillside, staring back at him – yes, that was his father.

  Ever since the train had lurched out of Beijing Station, his father had receded from Aki’s thoughts. This was odd, given that he was drawing closer to him every moment. The sound of Cai Fang’s breathing drifted up from the bunk below. The train plunged on into the night, moving westward at eighty kilometres an hour, deeper into the core of the continent. After a while the book slid from his hand. Shijiazhuang and Weizhou went by as he slept.

  The train clanked to a stop. With a start, he opened his eyes. The sound of cars being coupled or uncoupled came from the rear of the train. A voice said, “Taiyuan.”
Damn, he had slept through Yangquan. Cai Fang, who had promised to wake him in time, was sound asleep. The bunk was so narrow that a third of his body hung out over the floor.

  Aki pulled the blanket back over his head. When he next awoke, they were at Pingyao, and Cao, the man with the attaché case, was gone.

  He climbed down and sat on the empty bed. The darkness grew lighter, as though sprinkled with grey ash. It was impossible to say when yesterday had ended and today had begun, but the bustle of morning was clearly underway: at each station where the train stopped, hawkers’ calls flew back and forth on the platform. Inside the train, the corridor was thronged with passengers on their way to the toilet or the dining car, or just roaming around.

  The snow had ceased, but snow clouds still filled the sky. The train was in the centre of the Loess Plateau. Dark smoke rose up from coal- and coke-burning fires; trucks, bicycles, and horse-drawn carts moved along roads muddy with melting snow, heading in the opposite direction from the train. Low adobe houses covered the hillsides. In the cliffs beyond a dry riverbed, the doors and windows of yaodong were lined up like portholes, while flocks of narrow-chested sheep climbed winding paths in front of them. Rays of sunlight poked feebly through rifts in the clouds.

  “Ni hao,” said their young travelling companion, climbing out of her bunk. After returning from the toilet, she sat down beside him and started to snack again. Where did she put it all, he wondered.

  Cai Fang woke up. As he slowly heaved himself up, he looked exactly like a bleary-eyed cow.

  “I slept through Yangquan,” said Aki.

  “Oh, right, I was going to wake you. I forgot I had to wake myself first. Woops.”

  The two men looked at each other and laughed.

  He turned eyes still half asleep towards the window. “Look, a Yili horse!” A bay was plodding along a mucky road beside the tracks, bobbing its head as it pulled a cart piled high with fuel. “See, its got a big body, and the legs are black from the shin down. These horses belong to the Kazakh people, and they’re uncommonly fast. I never knew they’d been brought so far east.” There was a tinge of sadness in his voice.