The Man From Beijing Read online

  He held his hands out towards the flames. It was now the third night since they had fled the mountain. San had not forgotten what Wang said would happen to anybody silly enough to run away. They would be condemned to work on the mountain for so long that it would barely be possible to survive.

  They still hadn’t spotted anybody chasing them. San suspected the foremen would assume the brothers were too stupid to use horses when they escaped. It sometimes happened that wandering bands of robbers stole horses from the depot, and if they were lucky the search would still be concentrated in the vicinity of the camp.

  But then one of the horses died. San’s little Indian pony seemed to be just as strong as the dappled horse Guo Si was clinging to. But suddenly it stumbled and fell over. It was dead by the time it hit the ground. San knew nothing about horses and assumed the horse’s heart had simply stopped beating, the way human hearts sometimes do.

  They had left the horse after first cutting a large lump of meat from its back. To confuse any possible pursuers they had changed direction rather more to the south than before. For several hundred yards San had walked behind Guo Si, dragging some branches behind him to cover their trail.

  He was woken up by a bang that almost made his head explode. When he opened his eyes, his left ear throbbing with pain, he found himself looking into the face he feared most. It was still dark, even if a faint pink glow could be seen over the distant Sierra Nevada. JA was standing there, with a smoking rifle in his hand. He had fired it next to San’s ear.

  JA was not alone. At his side were Brown and several Indians with bloodhounds on leads. JA handed his rifle to Brown and drew his revolver. He pointed it at San’s head. Then he aimed it sideways and fired a shot next to San’s right ear. When San stood up, he could see that JA was yelling something, but he couldn’t hear a word the foreman said. His head was filled with a thunderous roar. JA then pointed his revolver at Guo Si’s head. San could see the terror in his brother’s face, but could do nothing to help. JA fired two shots, one next to each ear. San could see the tears in Guo Si’s eyes caused by the pain.

  Their flight was over. Brown tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and placed nooses around their necks, and they started the trek back east.

  When they arrived at the mountain, JA paraded the escapees in front of the rest of the workers, their hands still tied behind their backs and nooses around their necks. San looked for Wang, but couldn’t see him. As neither of the brothers had recovered his hearing, they could only guess what JA had to say, perched on the back of his horse. When he had finished talking, he dismounted, and in front of the assembled workers he punched each of the brothers hard in the face. San fell over. For a brief moment he had the feeling that he would never be able to stand up again.

  But in the end he did. Once more.

  After the failed escape, what San expected to happen did in fact happen. They were not hanged, but every time nitroglycerine was used to blast open reluctant chunks of the mountain, it was San and Guo Si who were hoisted up in the baskets of death, as the Chinese workers called them. Even after a month, the brothers were still mostly deaf. San began to think that he would have to spend the rest of his life with the roaring noise filling his head.

  Summer, which was long and hot, had reached them. At enormous physical cost they penetrated further and further into the mountain, carved their way into the mass of stone that yielded not even a single inch without demanding maximum effort. Every morning San felt that he couldn’t possibly last one more day.

  San hated JA. A hatred that grew as time passed. It was not the physical brutality, nor even being hoisted up over and over again in the potentially fatal baskets. It was that when they’d been forced to stand in front of the other railway workers with nooses around their necks, they were put on display like animals.

  ‘I’m going to kill that man,’ said San to Guo Si. ‘I’m not going to leave this mountain without first having killed him. I shall kill him.’

  ‘That means we will also die,’ said Guo Si.

  San was insistent.

  ‘I shall kill that man when the time is right. Not before. But then.’

  The summer seemed to get hotter and hotter. They were working in broiling sunshine from early morning until distant dusk. Their working hours increased as the days became longer. Several of the workers were stricken by sunstroke; others died of exhaustion. But there always seemed to be more Chinese who could take the places of the dead.

  They came in endless processions of wagons. Every time a newcomer arrived at the door of their tent, he was bombarded with questions. Where did he come from, what ship had transported him over the ocean? There was an insatiable hunger for news from China.

  During these summer months, as the brothers’ hearing returned, JA was struck down by a fever and didn’t appear. One morning Brown came to say that as long as the foreman was indisposed, the two brothers would not be the ones hoisted up in the baskets of death. He made no attempt to explain why he was excusing them from this dangerous work. Perhaps it was because the foreman often treated Brown just as badly as any of the Chinese. San cautiously attempted to get to know Brown better.

  San often wondered about the reddish-brown people with long, black hair, which they sometimes adorned with feathers: their facial features reminded him of his own.

  One evening he asked Brown, who knew a little Chinese, about them.

  ‘The Red Indians hate us,’ said Brown. ‘Just as much as you do. That’s the only similarity I can see.’

  ‘But even so, they are the ones standing guard over us.’

  ‘We feed them. We give them rifles. We let them be one step above you. And two steps above the niggers. They think they have power. But in fact they are slaves like everybody else.’

  ‘Everybody?’

  Brown shook his head. San was not going to receive an answer to his last question.

  They sat in the darkness. Now and then the glow from their pipes lit up their faces. Brown had given San one of his old pipes and also some tobacco. San was constantly on his guard. He still didn’t know what Brown wanted in return. Perhaps he just wanted company, to break the boundless solitariness of the desert, now that the foreman was ill.

  Eventually San dared to ask about JA.

  Who was this man who never gave up until he had tracked down San and his brother and ruined their hearing? Who was this man who derived pleasure from torturing other people?

  ‘I’ve heard things,’ said Brown, biting hard on the stem of his pipe. ‘The story is the rich men in San Francisco who invested money in this railway gave him a job as a guard. He was good – chased after escapees and was clever enough to use both dogs and Indians. And so they made him a foreman. But sometimes, as in your case, he reverts to chasing escapees. They say that nobody has ever got away from him, unless you count the ones who died out there in the desert. In such cases he cut off their hands and scalped them, just like the Indians do, to demonstrate that he’d tracked them down despite everything. A lot of people think he’s superhuman. The Indians say he can see in the dark. That’s why they call him Long Beard Who Sees in the Night.’

  San thought over what Brown had said.

  ‘He doesn’t speak like you do. What he says sounds different. Where does he come from?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. Somewhere in Europe. From a country in the far north, somebody said, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘Does he ever say anything about that himself ?’

  ‘Never. That stuff about a country in the far north might not be true.’

  ‘Is he an Englishman?’

  Brown shook his head. ‘That man comes from hell. And that’s where he’ll go back to one of these days.’

  San wanted to ask more questions, but Brown was reluctant.

  ‘No more about him. He’ll soon be back. His fever is dying away, and water doesn’t run straight through his stomach any more. When he’s back here there’s nothing I’ll be able to do to
save you from dancing with death in the baskets.’

  A few days later JA was back on duty. He was paler and thinner than before, but more brutal. The very first day he knocked out two Chinese who worked alongside San and Guo Si simply because he thought they didn’t greet him politely enough when he came riding up on horseback. He was not pleased with the progress made while he had been sick.

  The brothers were sent back up in the baskets again. They could no longer count on any support from Brown.

  They burrowed their way deeper into the mountain, blasting and hacking, shifting boulders and moulding hard-packed sand to form the roadbed on which the rails would be laid. With superhuman efforts they conquered the mountain, yard after yard. In the distance they could see the locomotives delivering rails and sleepers and gangs of labourers.

  As the nights grew colder and the autumn advanced, Guo Si fell ill. He woke up one morning with bad stomach pains. He ran out of the tent and only just managed to pull down his trousers before his insides exploded.

  His fellow workers were afraid that they might all be infected and so left him alone in the tent. San brought him water, and an old black man by the name of Hoss kept moistening his brow and wiping away the watery mess that leaked out of his body. Hoss had spent so much time tending the sick that nothing seemed to threaten him any longer. He had only one arm; he had lost the other in a landslide.

  JA was impatient. He looked down in disgust at the man lying in his own faeces.

  ‘Are you going to die, or aren’t you?’ he asked.

  Guo Si tried to sit up but didn’t have the strength.

  ‘I need this tent,’ said JA. ‘Why do you Chinese always take so long to die?’

  The days grew shorter, and as autumn gave way to winter, miraculously, Guo Si began to get better.

  After four years, they had served their time and could leave the railway as free men. San heard about a white man named Samuel Acheson who was planning to lead a wagon trek eastward. He needed somebody to prepare his food and wash his clothes and promised to pay for the work. He had made a fortune panning for gold in the Yukon River. Now he was going to traverse the continent in order to visit his sister, his only living relative, who lived in New York.

  Acheson agreed to employ both San and Guo Si. Neither of them would regret joining his trek. Samuel Acheson treated people well, irrespective of the colour of their skin.

  Crossing the whole continent, the endless plains, took much longer than San could ever have predicted. On two occasions Acheson fell ill and was confined to bed for several months. He didn’t seem to be plagued by physical illness; it was his mind that descended into gloom so murky that he hid himself away in his tent and didn’t emerge until the depression had passed. Twice every day San would serve him food and see Acheson lying at the back of his tent, his face averted from the world.

  But both times he recovered, his depression faded away and they could continue their long journey. He could have afforded to travel by rail, but Acheson preferred his phlegmatic oxen and the uncomfortable covered wagons.

  Out in the vast prairies, San would often lie awake in the evenings, gazing up at the endless skies. He was looking for his mother and father and Wu, but never found them.

  They eventually reached New York, Acheson was reunited with his sister, San and Guo Si were paid and they began looking for a ship that would take them to England. San knew that was the only possible route for them to take, since there were no ships sailing directly to Canton or Shanghai from New York. They managed to find places on deck on a ship bound for Liverpool.

  That was in March 1867. The morning they left New York, the harbour was shrouded in thick fog. Eerie foghorns wailed on all sides. San and Guo Si were standing by the rail.

  ‘We’re going home,’ said Guo Si.

  ‘Yes,’ said San. ‘We’re on our way home now.’

  The Feather and the Stone

  14

  On 5 July 1867, the two brothers left Liverpool on a ship called Nellie.

  San soon discovered that he and Guo Si were the only Chinese on board. They had been allocated sleeping places at the very front of the bow in the old ship that smelled of rot. On board the Nellie the same kind of rules applied as in Canton: there were no walls, but every passenger recognised his own or others’ private space.

  Even before the ship left port San had noticed two unobtrusive passengers with fair hair who frequently knelt down on deck to pray. They seemed unaffected by everything going on around them – sailors pushing and pulling, officers urging them on and barking orders. The two men were totally immersed in their prayers until they quietly stood up again.

  The two men turned to face San and bowed. San took a step back, as if he had been threatened. A white man had never bowed to him before. White men didn’t bow to Chinese; they kicked them. He hurried back to the place where he and Guo Si were going to sleep and wondered who these two men could be.

  Late in the afternoon the moorings were cast off, the ship was towed out of the harbour and the sails were hoisted. A fresh northerly breeze was blowing. The ship set off in an easterly direction at a brisk pace.

  San held on to the rail and let the cool wind blow in his face. The two brothers were now on their way home at last, to complete their voyage around the world. It was essential to stay healthy on the voyage. San had no idea what would happen when they arrived back in China, but he was determined that they would not sink into poverty once more.

  A few days after they had left port and reached the open sea, the two fair-haired men came up to San. They had with them an elderly member of the crew who spoke Chinese. San was afraid that he and Guo Si had done something wrong, but the crewman, Mr Mott, explained that the two men were Swedish missionaries on their way to China. He introduced them as Mr Elgstrand and Mr Lodin.

  Mr Mott’s Chinese pronunciation was difficult to understand, but San and Guo Si understood enough to discover that the two young men were priests who had dedicated their lives to work in the Christian mission to China. Now they were on their way to Fuzhou in order to build up a community in which they could begin to convert the Chinese to the true religion. They would fight against paganism and show the way to God’s kingdom, which was the ultimate destination for all human beings.

  Would San and Guo Si consider helping these gentlemen to improve their fluency in Chinese, which was such a difficult language? They had a smattering already but wanted to work hard during the voyage so that they would be well prepared when they disembarked on the Chinese coast.

  San thought for a moment. He saw no reason that they should not accept the remuneration the fair-haired men were prepared to pay. It would make their own return to China easier.

  He bowed.

  ‘It will give Guo Si and me great pleasure to help these gentlemen become better acquainted with the Chinese language.’

  They started work the very next day. Elgstrand and Lodin wanted to invite San and Guo Si to their part of the ship, but San said no. He preferred to remain in the bow.

  It was San who became the missionaries’ teacher. Guo Si spent most of the time sitting to one side, listening.

  The two Swedish missionaries treated the brothers like equals. San was surprised that they were not undertaking this voyage in order to find work, or because they had been forced to leave. What drove these young men was a genuine desire and determination to save souls from eternal damnation. Elgstrand and Lodin were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their faith. Elgstrand came from a simple farming family, while Lodin’s father had been a rural minister. They pointed out on a map where they came from. They spoke openly, making no attempt to hide their simple origins.

  When San saw the map of the world, he realised the full extent of their journey.

  Elgstrand and Lodin were keen students. They worked hard and learned quickly. By the time the ship passed through the Bay of Biscay, they had established a routine involving lessons in the morning and in the late afternoon. San started
asking questions about their faith and their God. He wanted to understand things about his mother that had been beyond his comprehension. She had known nothing about the Christian God, but she had prayed to other invisible higher powers. How could a person be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to make other people believe in the God that person worshipped himself ?

  Elgstrand spoke more often, reinforcing the message that all men are sinners but could be saved and after death could enter paradise.

  San thought about the hatred he felt for Zi, for Wang (who was probably dead) and for JA. Elgstrand maintained that the Christian God taught that the worst crime a man could commit was to kill a fellow human being.

  San didn’t like that idea at all; his common sense told him that Elgstrand and Lodin couldn’t be right. All the time they talked about what was in store after death, but never about how a human life could be changed while it was being lived.

  Elgstrand often came back to the idea that all human beings were equal. In the eyes of God everybody was a poor sinner. But San could not understand how, when the Day of Judgement dawned, he and Zi and JA could be assessed equally.

  He was extremely doubtful. But at the same time he was pleasantly surprised by the kindness and apparently boundless patience the two young men from Sweden displayed towards him and Guo Si. He could also see that his brother, who often had private conversations with Lodin, seemed to be impressed by what he heard. As a result, San never initiated any discussions with Guo Si about his opinion of the white God.

  Elgstrand and Lodin shared their food with San and Guo Si. San couldn’t know what was true and what wasn’t true when it came to their God, but he had no doubt that the two men lived in accordance with what they preached.

  After thirty-two days at sea the Nellie called at Cape Town to replenish stores and rode at anchor in the shadow of Table Mountain before continuing southward. As they came to the Cape of Good Hope, they were hit by a severe southerly storm. The Nellie drifted for four days with sails taken in, riding the waves. San was terrified by the thought that the ship might sink, and he could see that the crew was scared as well. The only people on board who were completely calm were Elgstrand and Lodin. Or perhaps they concealed their fear well.