Li had butterflies in his stomach and his mouth was dry. He felt like a schoolboy waiting in the office of the head teacher, summoned to receive his punishment for some perceived misdemeanour. He had not set eyes on his father for nearly five years, a state of affairs for which, he knew, his father blamed him. Not without cause. For in all the years since Li had left his home in Sichuan Province to attend the University of Public Security in Beijing, he had returned on only a handful of occasions. And although he had been too young to be an active participant in the Cultural Revolution, Li felt that his father blamed him, somehow, for the death of his mother during that time of madness. A time which had also left his father in some way diminished. A lesser man than he had been. Robbed of hope and ambition. And love.
They had not spoken once since their brief encounter at the funeral of Li’s Uncle Yifu, his father’s brother. It had been a painful, sterile affair at a city crematorium, attended mostly by fellow police officers who had served under Yifu during his years as one of Beijing’s top cops, or alongside him in the early days. Old friends had travelled all the way from Tibet, where Yifu had been sent by the Communists in the fifties when they had decided that this particular intellectual would be less of a danger to them serving as a police officer a long way from the Capital. They need not have worried, for Yifu’s only desire had been to build a better and fairer China for its people. The same people who later abused him and threw him in prison for three years during the Cultural Revolution. An experience from which he had drawn only strength, where a lesser man might have been broken. Like his brother, Li’s father.
Li saw his father emerging from the gates, dragging a small suitcase on wheels behind him. He was a sad, shuffling figure in a long, shabby duffel coat that hung open to reveal a baggy woollen jumper with a hole in it over a blue shirt, frayed at the collar. A striped cream and red scarf hung loosely around his neck, and trousers that appeared to be a couple of sizes too big for him gathered in folds around shoes that looked more like slippers. He wore a fur, fez-like hat pulled down over thinning grey hair. Li felt immediately ashamed. He looked like one of the beggars who haunted the streets around the foreign residents’ compounds in embassy-land. And yet there was no need for it. He had an adequate pension from the university where he had lectured most of his adult life. He was well cared for in a home for senior citizens, and Li sent money every month.
Li made his way through the crowds to greet him with a heart like lead. When he got close up, his father seemed very small, as if he had shrunk, and Li had a sudden impulse to hug him. But it was an impulse he restrained, holding out his hand instead. His father looked at him with small black eyes that shone behind wisps of hair like fuse wire sprouting from the edge of sloping brows, and for a moment Li thought he would not shake his hand. Then a small, claw-like hand emerged from the sleeve of the duffel, spattered with the brown spots of age, and disappeared inside Li’s. It was cold, and the skin felt like crêpe that might rip if you handled it too roughly.
‘Hi, Dad,’ Li said.
His father did not smile. ‘Well, are you going to take my case?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’ Li took the handle from him.
‘You are a big man now, Li Yan,’ his father said.
‘I don’t think I have grown since the last time you saw me.’ He steered the old man towards the taxi rank where he had parked his Jeep, a police light still flashing on the roof.
‘I mean, you are a big man in your job. Your sister told me. A Section Chief. You are young for such a position.’
‘I remember once,’ Li said, ‘you told me that I should only ever be what I can, and never try to be what I cannot.’
His father said, ‘The superior person fulfils his purpose and does not boast of his achievements.’
‘I wasn’t boasting, father,’ Li said, stung.
‘He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady.’
Li sighed. There was no point in exchanging barbs of received Chinese wisdom with his father. The old man had probably forgotten more than Li ever knew. And yet the wisdom he imparted was always negative, unlike his brother, Yifu, who had only ever been positive.
Li put the case in the back of the Jeep and opened the passenger door to help his father in. But the old man pushed away his hand. ‘I don’t need your help,’ he said. ‘I have lived sixty-seven years without any help from you.’ And he hauled himself with difficulty up into the passenger seat. Li banged the door shut and took a deep breath. He had known it would be difficult, but not this hard. A depression fell over him like fog.
They drove in silence from the station to Zhengyi Road. Li turned right and made a U-turn opposite the gates of the Beijing Municipal Government, crossing the island of park-land that split the road in two, and driving down past the Cuan Fu Shanghai restaurant where he and his father would probably take most of their meals. The armed guard at the back entrance to the Ministry of State and Public Security glanced in the window, saw Li, and waved them through.
Li pulled up outside his apartment block on their right, and he and his father rode up in the elevator together to the fourth floor. Still they had not spoken since getting into the Jeep.
The apartment was small. One bedroom, a living room, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a long, narrow hallway. Li would have to sleep on the settee while his father was there. He had borrowed blankets and extra pillows. He showed the old man to his room and left him there to unpack. He went to the refrigerator and took out a cold beer, popped the cap and moved through to the living room which opened on to a large, glassed terrace with views out over the tree-lined street below, and beyond the Ministry compound to the Supreme Court and the headquarters of the Beijing Municipal Police. He drained nearly half the bottle in one, long pull. He was not sure why his father had come for the wedding. Of course, it had been necessary to invite him, but such was the state of their relationship he had been surprised when the old man had written to say he would be there. Now he wished he had just stayed away.
Li turned at the sound of the door opening behind him. Divested of his coat and hat, his father seemed even smaller. His hair was very thin, wisps of it swept back over his shiny, speckled skull. He looked at the bottle in his son’s hand. ‘Are you not going to offer me a drink? I have come a long way.’
‘Of course,’ Li said. ‘I’ll show you where I keep the beer. You can help yourself any time.’ He got another bottle from the refrigerator and opened it for his father, pouring the contents into a long glass.
They went back through to the living room, their awkwardness like a third presence. They sat down and drank in further silence until finally the old man said, ‘So when do I get to meet her?’
‘The day after tomorrow. At the betrothal meeting.’
‘You will bring her here?’
‘No, we’re having the betrothal at a private room in a restaurant.’
His father looked at him, disapproval clear in his eyes. ‘It is not traditional.’
‘We’re trying to make everything as traditional as we can, Dad. But my apartment is hardly big enough for everyone. Xiao Ling wanted to be there, and of course Xinxin.’ Xiao Ling was Li’s sister, Xinxin her daughter. Since her divorce from a farmer in Sichuan, Xiao Ling had taken Xinxin to live in an apartment in the south-east of Beijing, near where she had a job at the joint-venture factory which built the Beijing Jeep. Xiao Ling had always been closer to her father than Li, and maintained regular contact with him.