‘Up here, Ah Ke,’ called a tall, thin-lipped youth with a slogan wrapped around his head.
‘I can’t. Not today.’
The thin lips began to curl. ‘It is today that we need you.’
‘What is happening?’
An owl-faced boy leaned on the truck’s side. ‘We hear some things over the BBC and Radio America.’
‘Bad things,’ said the tall youth.
‘These soldiers around Beijing, they know nothing about what is happening in Tiananmen. They have been kept apart, in a camp. They do not know about the three thousand starving students, the million people of Beijing, all of us.’
‘What are they doing – the soldiers?’ said Ke, very softly.
‘We don’t know.’
‘But they are going to march on Tiananmen soon,’ said the tall youth. ‘Or why are they there? We are marching in Chengdu now, to show the old men of the Politburo that all China is against them. Come on, Ah Ke!’
‘I cannot. I promised.’
‘Oh, I see. Zhu Ke will march with us when the police are our friends, when we are the people’s heroes. But now, when it is a little dangerous, when we must have everyone, then Zhu Ke cannot be found.’
The tall youth slammed his hand on the cabin roof and the truck rocked away. Ke watched it go from the centre of the highway, until it had disappeared.
Leah stared silently at Ke, watching tears streak his face.
‘The coin,’ Tong said. ‘You know it was made in about 250 BC. Curiously, it was cast in a cluster of coins, the method used by the Romans at the same time.’
But he sounded flat, as if he was giving dictation.
‘That’s nice,’ said Li-Nan. ‘How about the scroll?’
‘It has unrolled,’ Tong said.
He was squatting in his kitchen beside a wooden box covered by a damp blanket. An iron kettle was simmering on the oven with a rubber tube running from the spout to the box.
‘Let’s see it, then,’ said Li-Nan, holding Ke by the arm.
Tong nodded and lifted the box away carefully. The scroll was held down by two pieces of wood, but it was unreadable. The yellow paper had nibbled holes, brown stains and black streaks. The writing was badly faded and in places washed away.
‘It’s all gone,’ said Li-Nan sadly.
Tong shrugged. ‘It’s not quite as bad as it looks. Water has got into the bamboo and an insect or two, but I think I can work it out eventually.’
‘Then you can still read it?’
‘Only what I have been working on.’ Tong pulled a notebook from his pocket. ‘ “I am Zhu Lin, head man of Turtle Land village and the father of two fine sons, Zhu Sheng and Zhu Bi. In order that it not be cast away, I wish to explain this piece of coin, this unlucky coin. To my misery … ” ’
‘Well?’
‘I have not gone any further yet.’
‘You are a house demon, Zhu Tong. This scroll must be deciphered by the time Zhu Joan comes out of that unhappy hospital.’
Leah leaped onto Joan’s bed, threw her arms around her and showed her the split coin.
‘Oh,’ Joan wheezed. ‘Ah,’ she said as Li-Nan and Ke and Tong walked into her room. Li-Nan and Tong wore grins as broad as her daughter’s and Ke was at least holding onto a smile.
‘We found it!’ said Leah.
‘In Ah Ke’s family chest,’ said Li-Nan.
‘With a scroll telling its story,’ said Tong.
‘If we ever get to read it,’ said Ke.
‘So we’re now officially Zhu. Mission accomplished.’
‘Welcome!’
Joan tried to say something, but the words jammed in her throat. Instead, she reached out and pulled Li-Nan to her side, beaming damply from Li-Nan to Leah and back. ‘Wonderful …’ she finally said.
‘We’re not much of a family to join, though,’ Tong said. ‘No emperors or generals …’
‘But a poet,’ said Ke.
‘And there is Ah Ke to put up with.’ Li-Nan threw a peanut at him.
Joan shook her head. ‘You’re perfect. Wonderful people. A family, I can’t believe it. I must get out of this hospital.’
Tong laughed. ‘That is what Li-Nan said.’
‘We will get you out of here very soon now,’ said Li-Nan. ‘And have a holiday in our house, in our village. We will kill a pig!’
Leah wrinkled her nose at Ke.
Joan sobered and took Li-Nan’s hand. ‘It is wonderful to find a friend and know that she is family too.’
‘ “This unlucky coin,” ’ Tong read. ‘ “To my misery I find it when I am breaking new ground to the north of the village with my sons, and in finding it I destroy it. I strike hard into rocky ground and a piece of the coin flies into the air. I pick up the two halves of the coin, and my sons dig for seven days for other coins but we are unlucky. Many villagers hear of our coin and dig around us but they are unlucky too. My sons and I laugh at their greed.
‘ “I decide to take the pieces of the coin to the wise woman of the village to see if it is worth anything. But this woman is no wiser than a sow. It is a bad decision … ” ’ Tong stopped with a shrug. ‘That is all I have done today.’
Ke picked up the pieces of coin and wandered away, examining them.
‘Don’t lose those,’ Tong called after him.
Leah followed Ke across the courtyard to the storeroom. Since the truck Ke had been a closed box, talking little and looking at his feet for most of the time. She had been looking for a way to open the box.
‘What’s up?’
Ke wandered silently past a few string-tightened saws, a pump, a hoe, and stopped. He pulled an old mattock from the wall and picked some of the dried soil from its heavy head.
‘Did that split the coin?’
Ke looked up. ‘It’s old enough.’
He fitted the broken coin against a chip near the corner of the mattock’s blade. It fitted.
‘That’s it!’ Leah squeezed him, then hastily let go.
Ke’s lips twitched. ‘One thing about we Chinese. We never throw anything away.’ He pressed his lips together.
‘The boy on the truck … it was a rotten thing to say.’
‘He was right. I should not be here.’
The owl-faced student stopped in the dust inside the bamboo, a lost, nervous boy. Ke saw him from the café, hesitated and ran to him. Leah watched them talk very quickly as they approached the group around the café. And Ke was grinning.
‘ – told them that you are a widow’s son,’ the student was saying.
‘Never mind, never mind. You tell them.’
‘Deng has surrendered,’ said Heng, and poured himself another rice wine.
‘He might as well,’ Ke said.
‘Excuse me,’ said the student, working his fingers. ‘Since the declaration of martial law, there are more marches, bigger marches than ever before.’
The student closed his fingers and pounded Heng’s table. ‘Everyone in China is marching now! People Power! All saying down with Li Peng, step down Deng Xiaoping! In Chengdu there is no room for cars on the roads, in Shanghai students have built a Statue of Liberty, in Hong Kong one and a half million people mass in the streets! Macao is flooded by a typhoon but the people wade through the water! In Beijing …’
The student stopped and panted.
‘In Beijing the People’s Liberation Army are sent to clear Tiananmen. But they fail. The trucks are stopped – by the people of Beijing. The soldiers had been told the students were a few thugs but the people told them the truth. The soldiers listened to the people and turned back.’
Ke was looking at Heng who was studying his small glass of rice wine in the shadow of the owl-faced student.
‘Li Peng’s martial law has failed.’
Heng flushed, but he stretched his glass toward the student. ‘As it should be. Li Peng has made a sad mistake and he must correct it. The people of China are angry.’
Tong laughed. ‘What is this? Treason f
rom the Party’s mouth? Watch for a flower pot dropping on your head!’
Heng reeled to his feet and staggered back against the wall. ‘You think I am a puppet? I would march to Tiananmen to carry a banner. I would do this tomorrow.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’
Heng shifted. ‘I am too old. But if I were younger …’
Ke suddenly looked ill.
‘ “… bad decision. The woman takes the split coin in her hands and says that it is worthless, but it is an omen. She says I have split the coin and this means that I will split my family. I tell the woman to stay with her tea-leaves and joss-sticks, but next year the River Min floods …” ’
‘It’s the waiting,’ Ke said, as he squelched across the field with two heavy buckets swinging from his shoulder yoke.
Leah stopped ahead and began to ladle from her buckets the manure of the geese, the ducks, the hens, the pigs and the buffalo, onto the soil. ‘The marches?’
‘They are going on, but they are getting smaller and nothing is happening. No army, no police, no movement from the Politburo. Are they waiting for us to give up and go home?’
‘But you’re winning.’
‘I don’t know … No, I can’t call myself part of the marchers any more. It’s not “us” that is winning. It’s “them”. I’ve dropped out.’
‘You are part of it, Ke!’
‘I’m not!’ Ke kicked at a clod and one of his buckets tipped some manure over his trousers. Ke shook his head. ‘That’s what I am.’
Joan sniffed as Leah sat down. ‘Daughter, you stink. More than ever.’
Leah smelt her arm and shrugged. ‘Suppose I do. It’s the work.’
‘Why can’t they use fertilizer?’
‘Because the crummy government won’t sell it to them.’
‘Of course. Must stop thinking I’m in Singapore or wherever, but you are beginning to sound like the Teenage Terrorist!’
‘Well they are crummy. You know Li-Nan has let him go back into Chengdu?’
‘What did she do that for?’
‘It’s got quiet now, and Ke was getting really desperate. Can we give our part of the coin to him?’
‘Oh, definitely. That was the whole purpose, wasn’t it? Father wanted it taken back to the ancestral village and we’ve done that.’ Joan smiled slyly at Leah. ‘And they tell me David Waters is getting his goofy wish too.’
Leah was surprised. ‘You weren’t supposed to know that yet.’
‘The scroll that tells the coin’s story? Oh, I am developing a little network of spies of my own.’
Leah laughed. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is. But when I get out of this blasted hospital – in three days – we are going to have to set about seeing some of China. Not for David, not for my father, but for us. All right?’
Leah hesitated for a flicker of an eye, but that was all. ‘Okay,’ she said. She owed Mum that, but she would miss Ke.
‘Just to make a part of China our paddy.’
Ke trailed past the café, the rolled flag dipping from his hand.
‘Hey, there!’ Heng called after him. ‘What news of the marchers?’
‘They’re still marching,’ Ke said and turned a corner.
Leah hurried after him. ‘Hello. Bad day?’
Ke flopped his arm over her shoulder, absently drawing her to his side. ‘Not the best. How’s the scroll going?’
‘Finished. Tong has been using his notebook to recreate a duplicate scroll. Have a look.’
‘That’s something at least.’ Ke poked his flag stick at the ground. ‘It’s coming apart, Leah. We’re still marching but there are fewer people. You can see the holes between the banners in Chengdu. In Tiananmen … well, the hunger strikers have gone. Some are in hospitals and there’s word that three have died. Students are going home and Zhao – the leader who came out of the Politburo and apologized – seems to have been pushed aside.’
Leah put her arm around the waist of the gangling youth and wanted to squeeze the sorrow out. ‘Is it finishing?’
‘I don’t know.’
They walked into the courtyard, across the dappled shade to the scroll, where they stopped. The scroll was now sandwiched between two plates of glass, a ragged, yellowing length of thick paper. Beside it Tong’s Full-Form Chinese characters marched up and down new white paper, as close to ancestor Zhu Lin’s elaborate writing as Tong could make it.
Leah blinked at the scroll’s black rhythm. There was her great great grandfather, plagued by a worthless coin and an amateur fortune-teller. And a famine. When Tong read the full story to her she had felt that David Waters was standing by her side, listening. Then it had been very good, the finish of a long and hard journey, but now? How could Ke feel about the troubles of a man from another century when half his mind was locked away in Tiananmen?
‘ “The first flood of the Min is nothing,” ’ Ke said in a low, dull voice. ‘ “We praise the Turtle God for digging the old canals and eat some of the food we have put away in the good years. But the second flood destroys villages around us and people begin to go hungry. The third year, the third flood kills our rice and wheat again and the famine begins. Thin people come to the village from the west for food but we are eating white earth and cockroaches. The thin people move on to the east and we wish them good fortune as there is nothing more we can give them.
‘ “One winter day Bi comes to me and says the land cannot support us all. He must take his wife to the richer land near the sea, before the hunger kills her. I argue with him but our fields are a lake after the fourth flood.
‘ “Bi and his wife leave Turtle Land, and I give him half of the coin I have broken. To remember us, this broken family. Perhaps he will bring it back someday. Farewell, my son.” ’
Ke remained staring at the scroll. ‘Well, that’s it.’
‘Almost.’ Leah pulled Joan’s old ring box from her pocket and pressed it into his hand.
‘What’s this?’ He opened the box to see the two halves of the coin nestling on the cotton wool.
‘Bringing the coin back.’
Ke picked up the two parts of the coin from the box and placed them on his palm. A light smile crept across his lips.
‘All right?’
‘Thinking. You know, the coin is China. The Politburo, the students. We did it, the Zhu and the Ji.’ Ke pushed the halves of the coin together. ‘Why can’t they?’
25 Quest
Leah looked up from the wok and saw Ke standing hesitant outside the kitchen. Li-Nan followed her eyes and waved the chopper at him.
‘Come in, come in. Don’t worry, the work’s all done.’
Ke took in a visible breath and stepped inside. He seemed slightly hunched.
Li-Nan’s face changed. She put the chopper down amongst the onions, wiped her hands on a rag and waited.
‘They’ve stopped the trains,’ he said.
‘Everywhere? Where?’
‘Wuhan. That’s almost everywhere.’
Leah remembered with surprise the windy city half way up the Yangtze, with the long bridge joining south China to the north. She had been there: Wuhan, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Chongqing, they were all part of her China. Almost as much as Ke’s China.
‘Who’s they?’
‘Maybe the students started it with the six-hour march across the bridge, but Li Peng is doing it now.’
‘Why?’
‘To stop students getting to Beijing, to Tiananmen.’ He looked away. ‘We’re failing, Mother. There are only two thousand students left in the square. They’re too tired to go on.’
Li-Nan did not speak, just watched Ke.
‘They must be supported.’
‘You are marching in Chengdu again. I’ve allowed that.’
‘Chengdu, Wuhan, Shanghai … it does not matter now. It only matters in Tiananmen.’
Leah saw that Li-Nan’s hands were knotted into white fists. She should not be here.
‘Wuhan is closed, but not Shanghai, not Chengdu …’
Li-Nan held his eyes. ‘No.’
Ke sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You are not going.’
‘I tried it your way, Mother. I tried to slop manure when Deng’s armies were marching into Beijing. I felt I was worse than Heng.’
‘That is silly. You have done enough.’ She threw back her head and shouted. ‘Hasn’t this family done enough?’
‘Would Father stop writing poetry?’
‘Don’t you throw Yuan at me! He’s dead!’
‘So I must be cautious, lick their boots all my life. “Take my money, cadre, sir, so I have the right to build a wall. Do not pay me enough to eat, because the party members must have colour televisions.” ’
Li-Nan whirled across the kitchen and pushed Ke violently in the chest, tumbling him backwards into a chair. ‘This is my home – not a bloody meeting hall!’
Ke sprawled in the chair like a broken doll. He looked away, at Leah, without recognition.
‘I will not be crushed by the thugs that run this country. Not again. You cannot go! Tell your conscience that you would have gone, but your demon of a mother stopped you!’
Ke moved his hand sluggishly to his pocket. He showed her a grey piece of cardboard.
The fire died on her face. ‘Ticket?’
‘The train goes tonight.’
She seemed to collapse over him, clutching at his shoulders, shaking him.
‘Hey, it’s not going to be bad. I just can’t not go to Beijing. I would look back at the one moment when I could have made a difference in the world.’
She mumbled against his neck. ‘Why couldn’t you be a Heng?’
‘Not enough fat.’
Li-Nan pulled her head up and looked at him. She tried a wet smile for a moment but it shook itself to pieces. ‘Oh, Zhu Ke …’ She dropped her head to his neck again.
Ke pressed his hands against her back. ‘Shush, there’s going to be nothing, nothing at all.’
But his face was pale.
26 Heng
Leah watched the last trace of the moon disappear behind a massive black cloud and walked heavily away from the glow from the kitchen. Li-Nan and Tong were talking through the nights now.
The China Coin Page 13