‘I’m on my own. My husband’s away. My children live in other towns. So you needn’t be afraid of meeting anybody.’
‘But I’m not alone. I have San with me.’
‘Where is he?’
Ho pointed to the other side of the street. San was leaning against a wall.
‘Call him over here,’ said Birgitta. ‘Then all three of us can go to my house.’
San seemed to be less disturbed now than he had been in the chaotic circumstances of their first meeting. Birgitta could see that he took after his mother: he had Hong Qiu’s face, and something of her smile.
‘How old are you?’ she asked him.
‘Twenty-two.’
His English was just as perfect as Hong Qiu’s and Ho’s.
They sat in the living room. San wanted coffee, while Ho drank tea. Set up on the table was the board game Birgitta had bought while in Beijing. In addition to her handbag, Ho was holding a paper bag. She produced from it several pages of handwritten Chinese. And she also took out a notepad with an English translation.
‘Ya Ru had a flat in London. One of my friends knew Lang, who was his housekeeper. She prepared his meals and surrounded him with the silence he craved. She let us into the flat, and we found a diary, which is where these extracts come from. I’ve translated part of what he wrote, which explains why most of this business took place. Not everything, but all the aspects we can understand. There were some motives that only Ya Ru could explain.’
‘He was a powerful man, according to what you’ve told me. That must mean that his death has attracted a lot of attention in China?’
San, who had said little so far, was the one who responded.
‘Nothing. No attention at all, just silence — the kind of silence Shakespeare writes about. “The rest is silence.” Ya Ru was so powerful that others who were just as powerful have succeeded in hushing up what happened. It’s as if Ya Ru never existed. We think that a lot of people were pleased or relieved when he died, even among those regarded as his friends. Ya Ru was dangerous. He collected knowledge that he used to destroy his enemies, or those he regarded as dangerous competitors. Now all his companies are being wound down, silence is being bought, everything is stiffening up and turning into a concrete wall separating him and his fate from both official history and those of us who are still alive.’
Birgitta leafed through the papers lying on her table. ‘Shall I read them now?’
‘No. Later, when you’re alone.’
‘And I don’t need to be afraid?’
‘No.’
‘Will I understand what happened to Hong Qiu?’
‘He killed her. Not with his own hands; somebody else did it for him. And was killed in turn by Ya Ru. One death covered up for the other. Nobody could believe that Ya Ru had killed his sister — apart from the most astute observers, who knew how Ya Ru thought about himself and others. But what’s remarkable and incomprehensible is how he could kill his sister and yet at the same time value his family, his forefathers, above all else. There’s something contradictory there, a riddle we’ll never be able to solve. Ya Ru was powerful. He was feared for his intelligence and his ruthlessness. But perhaps he was also ill.’
‘In what way?’
‘He was possessed by a hatred that corroded his personality. Perhaps he really was out of his mind.’
‘There’s one thing that has puzzled me. What were they actually doing in Africa?’
‘There’s a plan that involves China sending millions of its poor peasants to various African countries. Political and economic structures are currently being put in place that make some of these poor African countries dependent on China. For Ya Ru this was a cynical repetition of the colonialism practised earlier by the Western world. For him this was a farsighted solution. But for Hong Qiu, and for me and Ma Li and lots of others, this is an attack on the very foundations of the China we have helped to build up.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Birgitta. ‘China is a dictatorship. Freedom is limited at every turn; justice is weak. What exactly are you trying to defend?’
‘China is a poor country. The economic development everybody talks about has only benefited a limited part of the population. If this way of leading China into the future continues, with a gap between the rich and the poor growing wider all the time, it will end up in catastrophe. China will be thrust back once more into hopeless chaos. Or fascist structures will become dominant. We are defending the hundreds of millions of peasants who, when all’s said and done, are the ones whose labour is producing the wealth on which developments are based. Developments they are benefiting from less and less.’
‘But I still don’t understand. Ya Ru on one side, Hong Qiu on the other? Suddenly discussion is cut short, and he kills his own sister?’
‘The battle of wills currently taking place in China is about life and death. The poor versus the rich, those without power versus those with it all. It’s about people who are growing more and more angry as they see everything they have fought for being destroyed, and those who see opportunities to make their own fortunes and achieve positions of power they could previously never dream of. That is when people die.’
Birgitta turned to look at San. ‘Tell me about your mother.’
‘Didn’t you know her?’
‘I met her, but I can’t say that I knew her.’
‘It wasn’t easy to be her child. She was strong, determined, often considerate; but she could also be angry and spiteful. I freely admit that I was scared of her. But I loved her, because she tried to see herself as a part of something bigger. To her it was just as natural to help a drunken man onto his feet when he falls over in the street as it was to conduct intensive discussions about politics. For me she was more of a person to look up to than somebody who was simply my mother. Nothing was easy. But I miss her and know that I now have to live with that sense of loss.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to be a doctor. But I’m taking a year off. To mourn. To try to understand what it involves, living without her.’
‘Who is your father?’
‘He died a long time ago. He wrote poetry. All I know about him is that he died shortly after I was born. My mother never said much about him, only that he was a good man and a revolutionary. The only part of him left in my life is a photograph of him holding a puppy in his arms.’
They spoke at length that night about China. Birgitta admitted that as a young woman she had wanted to be a Red Guard in Sweden. But the whole time she was waiting impatiently for the moment when she could read the papers Ho had brought with her.
At about ten she called a taxi to take Ho and San to the railway station.
‘When you’ve finished reading,’ said Ho, ‘get in touch.’
‘Is there an end to this story?’
Ho thought for a moment before answering.
‘There’s always an end,’ she said. ‘Even in this case. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.’
Birgitta watched the taxi drive away, then sat down with the translation of Ya Ru’s diary. Staffan wasn’t due back home until the following day. She hoped she’d have finished reading by then. It was no more than twenty pages, but Ho’s handwriting was hard to decipher because the letters were so small.
What exactly was it, this diary she was reading? Afterwards, when she looked back on that evening alone in the house, with traces of Ho’s perfume still in the room, she knew she should have been able to work out for herself most of what had happened. Or, rather, she should have understood, but refused to accept what she really did understand.