When the meeting was over and President Mugabe had left the big conference room, Ya Ru and Hong Qiu met each other by the doors. Her brother had been standing there, waiting for her. They each took a plate and filled it from the buffet table. Ya Ru drank wine, but Hong Qiu was content with a glass of water.
‘Why do you send me letters in the middle of the night?’
‘I had the irresistible feeling that it was important. I couldn’t wait.’
‘The man who knocked on my door knew that I was awake. How could he know that?’
Ya Ru raised an eyebrow in surprise.
‘There are different ways of knocking on a door, depending on whether the person behind it is awake or asleep.’
Ya Ru nodded. ‘My sister is very cunning.’
‘And don’t forget that I can see in the dark. I sat out on my veranda for a long time last night. Faces light up in the moonlight.’
‘But there wasn’t any moonlight last night?’
‘The stars produce a light that I’m able to intensify. Starlight can become moonlight.’
Ya Ru eyed her thoughtfully. ‘Are you challenging me to a trial of strength? Is that what you’re up to?’
‘Isn’t that what you’re doing?’
‘We must talk. In peace and quiet. Revolutionary things are taking place out here. We have closed in on Africa with a large but friendly armada. Now we are involved in the landings.’
‘Today I watched two men lift a sack containing over a hundred pounds of cement onto a woman’s head. My question to you is very simple. Why have we come here with an armada? Do we want to help that woman to alleviate her burden? Or do we want to join those lifting sacks onto her head?’
‘An important question that I’d be happy to discuss. But not now. The president is waiting.’
‘Not for me.’
‘Spend your evening on your veranda. If I haven’t knocked on your door by midnight, you can go to bed.’
Ya Ru put down his glass and left her with a smile. Hong Qiu noticed that the brief conversation had made her sweat. A voice announced that Hong Qiu’s bus would be leaving in thirty minutes. Hong Qiu filled her plate once more with tiny sandwiches. When she felt she had eaten enough, she made her way to the back of the palace where the bus was waiting. It was very hot, the sun reflecting off the white stone walls of the palace. She put on her sunglasses and a white hat she had brought in her bag. She was about to enter the bus when somebody spoke to her. She turned round.
‘Ma Li? What are you doing here?’
‘I came as a substitute for old Zu. He’s been struck down with thrombosis and couldn’t make it. I was called in to replace him. That’s why I’m not on the list of participants.’
‘I didn’t notice you on the way here this morning.’
‘Somebody pointed out to me rather sternly that I’d sat myself in one of the cars, which protocol forbade me to do. Now I’m where I ought to be.’
Hong Qiu reached out and grasped hold of Ma Li’s wrists. She was exactly what Hong Qiu had been hoping for. Somebody she could talk to. Ma Li had been a friend ever since her student days, after the Cultural Revolution. Hong Qiu recalled an occasion early one morning, in one of the university’s day rooms, when she had found Ma Li asleep on a chair. When she woke up, they started talking.
It seemed to be preordained that they should be friends. Hong Qiu could still remember one of the first conversations they’d had. Ma Li had said that it was now time to stop ‘bombarding headquarters’. That had been one of the things Mao had urged the cultural revolutionaries to do. Not even the very top officials in the Communist Party should be spared the necessary criticism. Ma Li maintained that, instead, it was now necessary for her to ‘bombard the vacuum inside my head, all the lack of knowledge that I have to fight against’.
Ma Li trained to become an economic analyst and was employed by the Ministry of Trade as one of a group of experts whose job it was to keep a constant check on currency variations throughout the world. Hong Qiu had become an adviser to the minister responsible for homeland security, for coordinating the top military leaders’ views on the country’s internal and external defence, especially protection for the political leaders. Hong Qiu had been at Ma Li’s wedding, but after the birth of Ma Li’s two children their meetings had been irregular.
But now they had met once again, on a bus behind Robert Mugabe’s palace. They spoke non-stop during the journey back to the camp. Hong Qiu noticed that Ma Li was at least as pleased as she was at their reunion. When they reached the hotel, they decided to take a walk to the big veranda with the magnificent views over the river. Neither of them had any important engagements until the following day, when Ma Li was due to visit an experimental farm and Hong Qiu was supposed to attend a discussion with a group of Zimbabwean military leaders at Victoria Falls.
The heat was oppressive as they walked down to the river. They could see flashes of lightning in the distance and hear faint rumbles of thunder. There was no sign of animal life. It seemed that the whole place had suddenly been deserted. When Ma Li took hold of Hong Qiu’s arm, she gave a start.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Ma Li, pointing.
Hong Qiu looked but couldn’t see any sign of movement in the thick bushes that lined the riverbank.
‘Behind that tree where the bark has been peeled off by elephants, next to the rock sticking up out of the ground like a spear.’
Now Hong Qiu saw it. The lion’s tail was swinging slowly, whipping against the red earth. Its eyes and mane were occasionally visible through the leaves.
‘You’ve got very good eyes,’ said Hong Qiu.
‘I’ve learned to notice things. Otherwise your surroundings can be dangerous. Even in a city, or a conference room, there can be traps to stumble into, if you’re not careful.’
In silence, almost reverentially, they watched the lion venture down to the river and begin lapping up the water. Out in the middle of the river, a few hippos’ heads bobbed up and down. A kingfisher just as colourful as the one on Hong Qiu’s veranda alighted on the rail, with a dragonfly in its beak.
‘Peace and quiet,’ said Ma Li. ‘I long for it more and more, the older I become. Perhaps it’s the first sign of getting old? Nobody wants to die surrounded by the noise from machines and radios. The progress we make costs us a lot in the way of silence. Can a person really live without the kind of quiet we are experiencing right now?’
‘You’re right,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘But what about the invisible threats to our lives? What do we do about them?’
‘I suppose you are thinking about pollution? Poisons? Plagues that are constantly mutating and changing their appearance?’
‘According to the World Health Organisation, Beijing is currently the dirtiest city in the world. Recent measurements recorded up to one hundred and forty-two micrograms of dirt particles per cubic metre of air. The equivalent figure in New York is twenty-seven, in Paris twenty-two. As we know only too well, the devil is always in the details.’
‘Just think of all the people who discover that for the first time in their lives it’s possible for them to buy a moped. How can you persuade them not to?’
‘By strengthening the party’s control over developments. What is produced by goods, and what is produced by thoughts.’