After another three days they started coming across more and more people. Carts would clatter past laden with reeds and sacks of corn, while empty carts headed in the opposite direction. San plucked up his courage and shouted to a man sitting in one of the empty carts.
‘How far is it to the sea?’
‘Two days. No more. Tomorrow you’ll start to smell Canton. You won’t be able to miss it.’
He laughed and drove on. San watched him dwindling into the distance. What had he meant, suggesting that they would be able to smell the city?
That same afternoon they suddenly hit upon a dense cloud of butterflies. The insects were transparent and yellow, and their flapping wings sounded like rustling paper. San paused in the middle of the swarm, entranced. It felt like he’d entered a house with walls made of wings. I’d love to stay here, he thought. I wish this house didn’t have any doors. I could stay here, listening to the butterflies’ wings until the day I fall down dead.
But his brothers were out there. He couldn’t abandon them. He used his hands to create an opening in the wall of butterflies and smiled at his brothers. He wouldn’t let them down.
They spent another night under a tree after eating a little of the rice they had left. They were all hungry when they curled up for the night.
The following day they came to Canton. The dog was still with them. San was becoming more and more convinced that his mother had sent it from the kingdom of death to keep an eye on them and protect them. He had never been able to believe in all that nonsense. But now, as he stood outside the city gates, he began to wonder if that was really the way things were.
They entered the teeming city that had announced its imminent presence with no end of unpleasant smells, as they had been warned it would. San was afraid he might lose contact with his brothers in the mass of unknown people thronging the streets. He tied a long rope around his waist and attached it in similar fashion to his brothers. Now they couldn’t possibly get lost, unless somebody cut through the rope. They slowly made their way forward through the mass of people, amazed by all the enormous houses, temples and goods offered for sale.
The rope linking them together suddenly tightened. Wu pointed. San saw what had brought his brother to a halt.
A man was sitting in a sedan chair. Curtains usually hid whoever was being carried, but in this case they were open. Nobody could doubt that the man was dying. He was white, as if somebody had drenched his cheeks in a white powder. Or perhaps he was evil? The devil always sent demons with white faces to terrorise the earth. Besides, he didn’t have a pigtail and had a long, ugly face with a big, crooked nose.
Wu and Guo Si elbowed their way closer to San and asked if it was a man or a devil. San didn’t know. He’d never seen anything like it, not even in his worst nightmares.
Suddenly the curtains were drawn, and the sedan chair was carried away. A man standing next to San spat after the chair.
‘Who was that?’ San asked.
The man looked disparagingly at him and asked him to repeat the question. San could hear that their dialects were very different.
‘The man in the sedan chair. Who is he?’
‘A white man who owns many of the ships that visit our harbour.’
‘Is he ill?’
The man laughed.
‘They all look like that. As white as corpses that ought to have been buried ages ago.’
The brothers continued through the dirty, foul-smelling city. San observed the people all around him. Many were well dressed. They weren’t wearing ragged clothes like he was. He began to suspect that the world was not quite what he had imagined.
After wandering through the city for many hours, they glimpsed water at the end of the alleys. Wu broke loose and raced towards it. He plunged in and started drinking — but stopped and spat it all out when he realised that it was brine. The bloated body of a cat floated past. San observed all the filth, not just the dead body but also both human and animal faeces. He felt sick. Back home they had used their faeces to fertilise the small patches of land where they grew their vegetables. Here, it seemed that people simply emptied their shit into the water, despite the fact that nothing grew there.
He gazed out over the water without being able to see the other side. What they call the sea or the ocean must be a very wide river indeed, he thought.
They sat down on a see-sawing wooden jetty surrounded by so many boats that it wasn’t possible to count them all. Everywhere they could hear people shouting and screaming. That was another thing that distinguished life in the city from life in the village. Here people seemed unable to shut up, always having something to say or complain about. Nowhere could San detect the silence he had been so used to.
They ate the very last of the rice and shared the remains of the water in the flask. Wu and Guo Si eyed him hopefully. He would have to live up to their expectations. But how would he find work for them in this deafening, chaotic maelstrom of humanity? Where would they find food? Where would they sleep? He looked at the dog, which was lying with one paw over its nose. What do I do now?
He could feel that he needed to be alone in order to assess their situation. He stood up and asked his brothers to wait where they were, together with the dog. In order to put their minds at rest, and convince them that he wasn’t going to disappear into the mass of people and never return, he said, ‘Just think about that invisible rope that binds us together. I’ll be back soon. If anybody speaks to you while I’m away, answer them politely, but don’t go away from here. If you do, I’ll never be able to find you again.’
He explored all the alleys, but kept turning back in order to remember the way he’d come from. One of the narrow streets suddenly opened out into a square with a temple. People were genuflecting and walking with bowed heads towards an altar laden with offerings and incense.
My mother would have run forward to the altar and bowed down there, he thought. My father would also have approached the altar, but somewhat more hesitantly. I can’t remember him ever setting one foot before the other without hesitating.
But now he was the one who had to make up his mind what to do.
There were a few stones scattered around that had fallen from the temple wall. He sat down on one, feeling somewhat confused, thanks to the heat, the mass of people and the hunger he had tried to ignore for as long as possible.
When he had rested sufficiently, he returned to the Pearl River and all the quays that lined its banks. Men bowed down by heavy burdens were staggering along rickety-looking gangways. Further upriver he could see big ships with lowered masts being towed by tugs under bridges.
He paused and scrutinised all these men carrying burdens, each one bigger than the last. Foremen stood by the gangways, ticking off all the loads being carried aboard or ashore. They slipped a few coins to the porters, who then vanished into the alleys.
An idea hit him. In order to survive, they would have to carry. We can do that, he thought. My brothers and I, we are porters. There are no meadows here, no paddies. But we can carry things. We’re strong.
He returned to Wu and Guo Si, who were huddled up on the jetty. He stood there for a while, observing how they were clinging to each other.
We are like dogs, he thought. Everybody kicks us, we have to live on what others throw away.
The dog noticed his arrival and ran up to greet him.
San didn’t kick it.
11
They spent the night on the jetty as San couldn’t think of anywhere better to go. The dog watched over them, growling at any silent, tiptoeing feet that came too close. But when they woke up the next morning they found that somebody had succeeded in stealing their water flask. San was furious as he looked around. The poor steal from the poor, he thought. Even an empty water flask is desirable to somebody who has nothing.