‘Where is Qi?’
‘She left two days ago.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘I don’t know. She was very upset. She ran.’
‘She must have said something about where she was going.’
‘I don’t think she knew. But she might have gone to the river to wait for you there.’
San stood up like a shot, raced out of the room, through the main gate and down to the harbour. But he couldn’t find her. He spent most of the day looking for her, asking everybody he came across, but nobody had seen her. He spoke to the oarsmen, and they promised to let him know if Qi showed up.
When he got back to the mission station and met Elgstrand again, it was as if the Swede had already forgotten about what had happened. He was preparing for the service that was to be held the following day.
‘Don’t you think the courtyard ought to be swept?’ Elgstrand asked in a friendly tone.
‘I’ll make sure that’s done first thing tomorrow morning, before the visitors arrive.’
Elgstrand nodded, and San bowed. Elgstrand obviously considered Qi’s sin so serious that there was no redemption possible for her.
San simply could not understand that there were people who could never be granted the grace of God because they had committed the sin of loving another human being.
He watched Elgstrand and Lodin talking on the veranda outside the mission station’s office.
It was as if he were seeing them for the first time in their true light.
Two days later San received a message from one of his friends at the harbour. He hurried there. He had to elbow his way through a large crowd. Qi was lying on a plank. Despite the heavy iron chain around her waist, she had risen from the depths. The chain had become entangled with a rudder that raised the body to the surface. Her skin was bluish white, her eyes closed. San was the only one able to make out that her stomach contained a child.
Once again San was alone.
San gave money to the man who had sent the message to inform him of what had happened. It would be sufficient to have the body cremated. Two days later he buried the ashes in the same place Guo Si was already resting.
So this is what I’ve achieved in my life, he thought. I create and then fill my own cemetery. The spirits of four people are resting here already, one of whom was never even born.
He knelt down and hit his head over and over again on the ground. Sorrow swelled up inside him. He was unable to resist it. He howled like an animal. He had never felt as helpless as he did at this moment. He once felt capable of looking after his brothers: now he was a mere shadow of a man, crumbling away.
When he returned to the mission station late that evening he was told by the nightwatchman that Elgstrand had been looking for him. San knocked on the door of Elgstrand’s office, where the missionary was sitting at his desk, writing by lamplight.
‘I’ve missed you,’ said Elgstrand. ‘You’ve been away all day. I prayed to God and hoped that nothing had happened to you.’
‘Nothing has happened,’ said San, bowing. ‘It’s just that I had a bit of a toothache, which I cured with the aid of some herbs.’
‘That’s good. We can’t manage without you. Go and get some sleep.’
San never told Elgstrand or Lodin that Qi had taken her own life. A new girl was appointed. San buttoned up the pain inside himself and continued for many months to be the missionaries’ irreplaceable servant. He never said anything about what he was thinking, nor how he now listened to the sermons with a different attitude than before.
It was around this time that San felt he had mastered writing well enough to begin the story of himself and his brothers. He still didn’t know for whom he was writing it. Perhaps just for the wind. But if that was the case, he would force the wind to listen.
He wrote late at night, slept less and less but without letting that affect his duties. He was always friendly, ready to help, make decisions, manage the servants, and make it easier for Elgstrand and Lodin to convert the Chinese.
Nearly a year had passed since he had arrived in Fuzhou. San was well aware that it would take a very long time to create the kingdom of God that the missionaries dreamed about. After twelve months, nineteen people had converted and accepted the Christian faith.
He kept writing all the time, thinking back to the reasons that he left his home village in the first place.
One of San’s duties was to tidy up in Elgstrand’s office. Nobody else was allowed in there. One day when San was carefully dusting the desk and straightening the papers on it, he noticed a letter Elgstrand had written in Chinese. It was written to one of his missionary friends in Canton — they tried to practise their language skills together.
Elgstrand confided in his friend as follows: ‘As you know, the Chinese are incredibly hard-working and can endure poverty the same way that mules and asses can endure being kicked and whipped. But one mustn’t forget that the Chinese are also base and cunning liars and swindlers; they are arrogant and greedy and have a bestial sensuality that sometimes disgusts me. On the whole, they are worthless people. One can only hope that one day, the love of God will be able to penetrate their horrific harshness and cruelty.’
San read the letter a second time. Then he finished cleaning and left the room.
He continued working as if nothing had happened, wrote every night and listened to the missionaries’ sermons during the day.
One evening in the autumn of 1868 he left the missionary station without anybody noticing. He had packed all his belongings in a simple cloth bag. It was windy and raining when he left. The nightwatchman was asleep by the gate and didn’t hear San climbing over it. As he perched on top, he wrenched off the sign announcing that this was the gateway to the Temple of the One True God. He threw it down into the mud.
The street was deserted. It was pouring down.
San was swallowed up by the darkness, and vanished.
16
Ya Ru liked to sit alone in his office in the evenings. The skyscraper in central Beijing, where he occupied the entire penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, was almost empty by then. Only the security guards on the ground floor and the cleaning crew were still around. His secretary, Mrs Shen, was on call in an anteroom: she always stayed for as long as he thought he might need her — sometimes until dawn.
This day in December 2005 was Ya Ru’s thirty-eighth birthday. He agreed with the Western philosopher who had once written that at that age a man was in the middle of his life. He had a lot of friends who, as they approached their forties, felt old age like a faint but cold breeze on the back of their necks. Ya Ru had no such worries; he had made up his mind as a student never to waste time and energy worrying about things he couldn’t do anything about. The passage of time was relentless and capricious, and one would lose the battle with it in the end. The only resistance a man could offer was to make the most of time, exploit it without trying to prevent its progress.
Ya Ru pressed his nose up against the cold windowpane. He always kept the temperature low in his vast suite of offices, in which all the furniture was in tasteful shades of black and blood red. The temperature was a constant seventeen degrees Celsius, both during the cold season and in the summer when sandstorms and hot winds blew over Beijing. It suited him. He had always been in favour of cold reflection. Doing business and making political decisions were a sort of warfare, and all that mattered was cool, rational calculation. Not for nothing was he known as Tou Nao Leng-‘the Cool One’.