Dragon Dance

by Peter Tasker

  Martine looked at him in surprise. Shiina was offering his support in a way that was uncharacteristically direct. And the support of Shiina would outweigh the opposition of squadrons of mid-ranking bureaucrats.

  “Thank you very much, sensei. That’s a very generous offer.”

  “Perhaps you are wondering about the reason?” said Shiina, the leathery skin around his eyes crinkling with amusement.

  “The reason for what?”

  “The reason I provide you with information.”

  Martine fixed her gaze on a spot on the floor between them. “Yes, sometimes I do wonder.”

  “It’s nothing to do with any French girl, you know. That’s just a stupid story I made up to justify my actions to a couple of low-grade politicians. That’s the kind of thing they understand.”

  Shiina gave a cackle of laughter that modulated into a long, racking cough.

  “Are you feeling all right, sensei?”

  “Yes, yes,” Shiina wheezed. “I’m not ready to die yet. Now what were we talking about?”

  “The French girl.”

  “Ah, the nonexistent French girl. Such pretenses are no longer necessary, I think. The real reason is that you are the most objective journalist I know. You’re only interested in the story, not in what benefit you can get from it. That’s a rare thing these days.”

  [263] “Those are kind words.”

  “Not at all. This story must be told, for the good of the nation. I know you’ll tell it well, without distortion or prejudice. You have the advantage of looking in from outside. You see things that nobody else can see.”

  “Not even you, sensei?”

  Shiina smiled. “I am Japanese.” At that he embarked on a series of deep, wheezing coughs that signaled that the conversation was over. Martine trotted down the creaky wooden staircase, her mind bubbling with ideas and plans. This was the kind of story that needed more than a few columns of newsprint; it needed a whole book. But how would she do that? Take a year’s sabbatical? Quit completely? Suddenly there was so much going on. In Shiina’s words, it was a time of turbulence and change—for the world, and for Martine Meyer too.

  The place where Martine and Makoto usually met after work was a yakitori bar under the railway tracks in Shimbashi. They had gone there on the first evening they spent together, and had been dropping by several times a month ever since. It was cramped and steamy, and when the trains thundered overhead the plates skipped on the little counter and the windows buzzed in their frames. It had suffered no discernible impact from the crisis, or indeed from anything else that had happened over the past quarter of a century. The menu was unchanged. The battered tables and benches were unchanged. Most of the clientele was unchanged. Martine had never tasted better yakitori anywhere else.

  She poked her head through the sliding door, and the cook roared out a greeting. Makoto was sitting in the far corner nibbling on a stick of chicken gizzard. Today the place seemed livelier than usual. Or maybe it was Martine herself. Maybe her own high spirits were swirling around the smoky little restaurant, suffusing everything with a warm, soft energy.

  Makoto stood up when he saw her coming. He looked younger than she remembered, and astonishingly attractive. Somehow he seemed to be made of a denser, stronger material than anyone else in the room. Martine made a move toward him, then suddenly it hit her. She felt short of breath, dizzy. One hand grasped the top of a chair, the other dropped to her belly.

  Had the signs been right? Yes, for the first time she felt sure. Her body had known for several days, but now her mind was convinced of it too. There, deep inside her, was a tiny cluster of cells that would soon become shape and movement, then cries in the night, a real human presence. The hugeness of [264] the idea turned her legs to jelly. That’s what they had done, she and Makoto: they had planted the future.

  He was still standing there smiling at her. She smiled back and gave a little shrug. He responded with a shrug of his own. She knew that she didn’t understand this man, and probably never would. But he was the right man. A strange man in a strange country, but for a strange woman like Martine there could be no other. Light-headed with exhilaration, laughing at herself and at him and at everything else, she crossed the room toward him.

  EPILOGUE

  BEIJING 2008

  When the bearer of the Olympic flame came loping into the stadium, the crowd erupted in a single wordless roar. Rather than dying away, the noise steadily increased as more and more people joined in, bellowing, clapping, stamping their feet, waving flags, hurling streamers, lifting their faces to the heavens and adding their voices to the mighty roar.

  The man from Shanghai had heard nothing like it since the rally in Tienanmen Square forty years ago, when he, like tens of thousands of other schoolchildren, had stood with tears in his eyes and screamed out his devotion to the Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung.

  But the world was a different place now. The force creating this tidal wave of noise was not ideological hysteria, but legitimate national pride. Everyone present—from high party officials to the humblest factory worker—knew what was being celebrated. The long march was finally over. Two hundred years after the Western colonialists began their depredations, China had recovered its status as a great nation and the undisputed leader of Asia.

  The man from Shanghai smiled at the memory of Peng Yuan, the idiot scholar who had liked to sneer at “evolutionists.” Well, the evolutionists had been proven right. The world system had already shifted to accommodate China’s presence, and it would continue shifting for a long time to come. This was in accordance with the Way, the deep nature of things described by the sage Lao-tzu over two and a half thousand years ago, when Western Europe was the home of primitive barbarians and the ancient Greeks were amusing themselves with the first Olympic games.

  “The best course is the course of no action,” said Lao-tzu. The old general and that jumped-up son of his—what a pair of fools they had been not to understand this! It was an error that had cost them everything. The old [266] general had died within a week of his arrest, shriveled up like a baked frog once his medicine was stopped. The young general was still alive, coughing his lungs out in a prison camp close to the Mongolian border, stripped of all dignity and honor. The others who had aided them had been dealt with more swiftly.

  He watched as the torchbearer trotted around the track, the orange flame billowing above his head. How many gold medals was China going to win at these games? More than any other nation, that much was certain. As a member of the International Friendship Committee, he knew all about the “special diet” the athletes had been undergoing for the past five years. The results would be spectacular, setting the seal on the whole triumphant occasion.

  As the man from Shanghai listened to the noise of the crowd—now closer to screaming than cheering—another phrase of Lao-tzu’s popped into his head: “The wise man in the exercise of government empties the people’s minds, fills their bellies, weakens their will, and strengthens their bones.”

  Lao-tzu would have greatly approved of the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

  About the e-Book

  (AUGUST, 2003)—Scanned, proofed and formatted by Bibliophile.