IV
Sun steered Li’s Jeep carefully through the bike and tricycle carts that thronged the narrow Dongzhimen Beixiao Street, taking them down from Section One on to Ghost Street. Li sat in the passenger seat, huddled in his dark grey three-quarter-length woollen coat, a red scarf tied at the neck, gloved hands resting in his lap. He gazed out at the wasteland on their left. The streets and courtyards, the jumble of roofs that had once stretched away to the distant trees of Nanguan Park and the Russian Embassy beyond, were all gone. They had been replaced by a flattened, featureless wasteland where tower blocks and shops would eventually replace the life that had once existed there. For the moment it provided temporary parking for hundreds of bikes and carts belonging to the traders and customers of the food market opposite. Li looked right, and on the other side of the street the old Beijing that he knew so well existed still, as it always had. Although, for how much longer he was not sure.
A boy stood in the doorway of a downmarket clothes store in his red slippers, slurping noodles from a bowl. Next door, a woman wrapped in a brown coat was arranging oranges in boxes along her shop front. A group of young men was delivering fresh cooked lotus buns from the back of a tricycle, hands blue with the cold. A woman with a jaunty hat and green scarf cycled slowly past them, talking animatedly into her cell-phone. An old man with matted hair, sporting army surplus jacket and trousers, strained at his pedals to move a tottering pile of coal briquettes at less than walking pace.
Li told Sun to pull in at the corner where a woman was cooking jian bing in a pitched roof glass shelter mounted on the back of an extended tricycle. She wore blue padded protective sleeves over a white jacket, and a long black and white chequered apron over that. A round white hat was pulled down over her hair, covering her eyebrows, and there was a long red and white silk scarf wrapped several times around her neck. For years Mei Yuan had occupied the space on the south-east corner of the intersection. But all the buildings had been demolished and hoardings erected. She had been forced to the opposite side of the road.
Li gave her a hug.
‘You missed breakfast this morning,’ she said.
‘I was too early for you,’ he smiled. ‘And my stomach has been grumbling all morning.’
‘Well, we can put that right straight away,’ she said, brown eyes shining with fondness. She glanced at Sun. ‘One? Two?’
Li turned to Sun. ‘Have you tried a jian bing yet?’
Sun shook his head. ‘I’ve driven past often enough,’ he said, ‘but I never stopped to try one.’ He did not sound very enthusiastic.
‘Well, now’s your chance,’ Li said. And he turned back to Mei Yuan. ‘Two.’
They watched as she leaned into the shelter through a large opening on the far side and poured a scoop of batter mix on to a large hotplate. She dragged it into a perfect circle before breaking an egg on to it and smearing it over the pancake. From a jar she sprinkled the pancake with seeds and then flipped it over, steam rising from it all the while. Above the roar of the traffic in Ghost Street and the blasting of car horns, they could hear the repetitive rhythmic thumping of sledge-hammers on concrete as demolition men worked hard to reduce the city around them to rubble.
Mei Yuan was smearing the pancake now with hoisin and chilli and other spices from jars around the hotplate before throwing on a couple of handfuls of chopped spring onion. Finally she placed a square of deep fried, whipped egg white in its centre, folded the pancake in four and scooped it up in a paper bag. Li handed it to Sun who looked apprehensive. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Try it.’
Reluctantly, Sun bit into the soft, savoury, spicy pancake which dissolved almost immediately in his mouth. He smiled his surprise. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘This is good.’ And he took another mouthful, and another. Li grinned. Mei Yuan had already started on his.
She said, ‘I have the answer to your riddle. It really was too easy.’
‘Riddle?’ Sun looked perplexed. ‘What riddle?’
Li said, ‘Mei Yuan and I set each other riddles to solve each day. She always gets mine straight away. I usually take days to figure out hers.’
Sun looked from one to the other in disbelief before taking another mouthful of jian bing and saying, ‘Okay, try it on me.’
Li looked faintly embarrassed. ‘It’s just a silly game, Sun.’
‘Let the boy see if he can work it out,’ Mei Yuan said.
Li shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What is as old as the world, but never older than five weeks?’
Sun thought for a moment, then he glanced suspiciously from one to the other. ‘Is this a joke? There’s a catch, right? So I make a fool of myself.’
‘There’s no catch,’ Li said.
Sun shrugged. ‘Well, then, it’s obvious,’ he said. ‘It’s the moon.’
‘Hah!’ Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. ‘You see? Too easy.’ Then she looked thoughtfully at Sun. ‘You know, I could have made a better riddle out of it with you.’
Sun was taken aback. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Your name is Sun. In Roman letters that would be spelled S-U-N. Which in English means the sun, in the sky. Given some time I could have made an interesting wordplay with sun and moon to create a riddle just for you.’
‘You speak English?’ Sun was clearly astonished at the idea that some peasant woman selling snacks on a street corner could speak a foreign language. Then suddenly realised how he must have sounded. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’
‘Do you speak English?’ Mei Yuan asked.
He shrugged, embarrassed now. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘Not very well.’
Li grinned. ‘Mei Yuan graduated in art and literature from Beijing University.’
‘But life does not always follow the path we plan for it,’ she said quickly. ‘Do you have any English books? My passion is reading.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Sun said, clearly disappointed that he could not oblige. Then suddenly he said, ‘But I have a friend whose English is excellent. He has many books. I’m sure he would be happy to lend you some. What kind do you like?’
‘Oh, anything,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘History, literature…’ she grinned, her cheeks dimpling, ‘…a good detective story…’
‘I’ll see what he has.’
Li reached over and pulled out a book stuffed down the back of her saddle. It was where she always kept her current book, pages read in snatches between the cooking of pancakes. ‘Bon-a-part-e,’ he read, ignorance furrowing his brow. ‘What is it?’
Her face lit up. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. You know him?’ Her eyes flickered between them.
‘Not personally,’ Sun said.
Li shook his head.
‘He was a dictator in nineteenth-century France,’ she told them, ‘who conquered nearly all of Europe. He died in lonely exile, banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic. Some people even think he was murdered there. It is a fascinating story. I can lend it to you if you are interested.’
‘My English wouldn’t be good enough,’ Sun apologised.
‘Put it on the shelf for me,’ Li said, and he stuffed it back down behind the saddle. He had almost finished his jian bing, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, licking his lips. ‘So what do you have for me today?’
Mei Yuan’s smile widened, lights dancing mischievously in her dark eyes. ‘This is a good one, Li Yan,’ she said. ‘It is the story of Wei Chang.’ And she wiped cold red hands on her apron. ‘Wei Chang,’ she began, ‘was born on the second of February in the year nineteen twenty-five. He was a great practitioner of I Ching, and people would come from all over China to seek his advice and learn the future. One day, on his sixty-sixth birthday, a young woman came to see him. Before anything else he explained to her how important numbers and calculations would be in correctly interpreting her situation and prospects. For that reason, he said, he would not ask her name, but would instead give her a unique number. In that way they could keep a record of her readings. Then he explained how he would arrive at that unique number.