The Fourth Sacrifice (32 page)

When I went to the door of the classroom, I could see him on his knees on the stage, his head bowed, the sign swinging from his neck. They were shouting, ‘Down with Teacher Yuan.’ They demanded to know why he had neglected his students, why he refused to work. Did he think he was too good to serve the people? What could he say? Even if he were capable of answering, how could he answer such questions? He was ill, so very, very ill.

But each time he failed to answer, they would take it in turns to hit him across the back of his neck with the cane. I could hear the sound of it. I could feel his pain with every stroke. Then Ge Yan pulled his head back by the hair, and the one called Zero forced him to drink a pot of ink. He gagged and was sick, but still they forced it down his throat.

I screamed at them to stop, but no one could hear me over the noise, and the girl who had taken me to the classroom stopped me from trying to reach him. I have the bruises of her fingers on my arms as I write.

It was just their revenge. Because he had shouted at them and threatened them with his father’s stick if they hit me again. I feel so guilty, Tao. It is my fault they did this to him. If I had not tried to stop them tearing up our family photographs, if I had just accepted there was nothing I could do, perhaps they would have let him be.

When he fell over, at first they tried to get him back to his knees, but he was quite unconscious and I think they thought then that he was dead.

It was strange, because suddenly the whole square went quiet, as if somehow the game had all gone terribly wrong. Just children. They had no idea what they were doing.

I ran to the stage, and they all moved aside to let me past. No one stopped me as I got up and removed the sign from around your father’s neck. His mouth and face were black from the ink, and there was vomit all down his tunic. But I could hear him breathing. Short, shallow breaths.

I kneeled down and drew him up into my arms, but he was too heavy for me to lift on my own. I called out, ‘Will anybody help me?’ But no one moved. And then Ge Yan, the bird boy, ordered some of the children to give me a hand to take away this ‘black revisionist’.

When, eventually, I got him home and into bed, I went to get the doctor. But when I told him what had happened he did not want to come, and so I have sat here alone with your father for hours now, keeping him cool with cold compresses, tipping his head forward to make him take some water.

It is dark. I don’t know what time it is. Sometime after two. Outside it is very quiet, and the house is very still. And yet I can barely hear your father breathing. I don’t know what he has done to deserve this. You know what a kind and gentle man he is. Oh, Tao, I am so, so weary.

June 6th, 1967

Tao, your father is dead. Sometime after four this morning, I fell asleep in the chair by the bed, and when I awoke he was quite cold. He died alone, while I slept. I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself. I am so sorry, my son. Please know that I love you. I hope you will make a better life for yourself than this.

It was the last entry, although there were many blank pages after.

Li sat with tears filling his eyes, and saw that the first grey light of dawn had appeared in the sky. As a young boy he had been devastated by his mother’s death in prison, shocked and distressed to see his father reduced to the palest shadow of his former self. But he could not imagine how Yuan Tao must have felt, nearly thirty years on, reading his mother’s harrowing account of his father’s death. Of the sickening humiliation and brutality meted out by barbarous, ignorant youths whom his own father had taught. He could picture tears, and anger, and knew that in reading those lines the seeds of revenge had been sewn deep in Yuan Tao’s heart.

And he also knew now who had killed Zero and Monkey and Pigsy. And why.

He swivelled his chair and sat for a long time staring out of the window at a grey sky shot with streaks of pink. Li felt inestimably sad. How empty Yuan Tao’s life must have been for it to have been consumed so quickly by hate and revenge. A failed marriage. No children. An undistinguished academic career that was going nowhere. How often, Li wondered, had he regretted leaving his home country, destined always to be a stranger in a strange land? What guilt must he have felt, on reading his mother’s diary, to realise that what he had escaped had cost his father’s life? That while he was safe on the far-off campus of an American university, his father had been persecuted and hounded to his death by Yuan’s own classmates. And so hate had filled his emotional void. And revenge had given his life a purpose.

And for five years he had planned his revenge. Engineered his return to Beijing, and methodically set about the execution of his father’s tormentors, in a ritual that closely replicated the manner of his father’s final humiliation.

Although the diary in no way provided conclusive evidence, it made perfect sense. Li had no doubts. But it still left one deeply puzzling question unanswered. Who killed Yuan? And why?

There was a knock at the door and Qian poked his head in. He seemed surprised to see Li. ‘Someone said you were in.’ This, as if he hadn’t believed it. ‘You’re early today, boss.’ And then he noticed the fog of cigarette smoke that filled the room, and the deep lines etched under Li’s eyes. He frowned. ‘Have you been here all night?’

Li nodded and slipped the diary into its plastic bag and held it out to Qian. ‘Get this checked for fingerprints, Qian. Then get copies made for everyone on the team.’

Qian took it and looked at it with curiosity. ‘What is it, boss?’

‘A motive for murder.’

IV

Yang Shouqian lived in a crumbling apartment block just south of Guang’anmen Railway Station. He was, Li reckoned, somewhere in his middle fifties, with thinning hair and a long, lugubrious face. His wife was a short, round-faced woman with a pleasant smile who invited Li into their kitchen. They were just having breakfast, she said, before Yang went to work at the nearby Ministry of Hydroelectricity. She was steaming some lotus paste and red bean buns. Would Li like some? Li accepted the offer and sat with them at their table, trains rattling past every few minutes on the southbound line, which they overlooked from the rear of the apartment. He was grateful for the hot green tea and the sweet buns, and felt the fatigue of a night without sleep sweep over him. The burden of his news weighed heavily.

Yang looked at him curiously. ‘My wife says you have word of my Cousin Tao.’

Li nodded. ‘Have you seen him in the last few months?’

Yang was astonished. ‘Seen him? You mean he is in Beijing?’

‘For about six months.’

Yang’s initial delight turned quickly to confusion, and then to hurt. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not seen him. He has not been in touch.’ His wife put a concerned hand over his.

She looked at Li, sensing immediately that something was wrong. Why else would he be here? ‘What has happened?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid he has been murdered,’ Li said.

Yang went quite pale, and his wife squeezed his hand. ‘I don’t understand,’ Yang said. ‘Murdered? Here in Beijing?’ It seemed extraordinary to him that such a thing was possible. ‘Who by?’

‘We do not know,’ Li said. ‘Was he in touch with you at all? At any time over the last few years?’

Yang shook his head. ‘Never. I have never heard from him in all this time. He was a spotty teenager when I last saw him, shortly before he left for America.’

‘But
you
wrote to
him
?’

Yang looked up quickly, surprised. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I have the letter you sent him in 1995.’

‘I didn’t know you’d written to Cousin Tao, Shouqian,’ his wife said.

He nodded. ‘You remember, when I sent him the diary?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She looked at Li and shook her head sadly. ‘Such a tragedy.’

‘You read it?’ Li asked.

‘Not all of it. Shouqian showed me it before he sent it.’

Li said, ‘You told him that you were keeping the letter Tao’s mother had written to your mother.’ He paused. ‘Why?’

‘Because, as you say, it was written to
my
mother,’ Yang said. ‘It belonged to her, and therefore to me, not Cousin Tao.’ He examined his nails for a moment in studied silence. ‘Besides,’ he said eventually, ‘it was probably better that he never saw it.’

‘Why?’

‘On top of the diary …’ He shrugged. ‘It would have been too much.’

Li said, ‘May I see it?’

Yang darted him a quick look, and Li saw something that was almost like shame in his eyes. He nodded and got up and crossed to a dresser against the far wall. He opened a drawer and began searching through a bundle of papers.

‘Did you know any of the Red Guards who hounded Tao’s father?’ Li asked.

Yang shook his head. ‘No. They were all younger than me, and we went to different schools.’

Li said, ‘In the last month three of them have been murdered.’

Yang’s wife gasped. Yang turned to look at Li, and the shame Li had seen in his eyes had turned to something else that he could not quite identify. ‘Dear God,’ Yang said. ‘Tao killed them, didn’t he?’ And Li knew that it was fear in his eyes.

‘I think it is very possible,’ Li said.

Yang’s wife was quickly on her feet, and she held his arm as he staggered momentarily before steadying himself. He moved back to the table, clutching an old yellowed envelope in his hand and sat down heavily. ‘Because I sent him the diary,’ he said, his fear realised and turning quickly to guilt. ‘I might as well have killed them myself.’ And he was struck by an even more horrifying thought and looked up at Li. ‘Is that why Cousin Tao was murdered?’

Li shrugged hopelessly. ‘I don’t know.’

Yang’s head dropped. ‘I should never have sent it to him. But after all these years I thought he had a right to know. I never for a moment thought …’ He broke off, his voice choked with emotion.

His wife hugged him and said, ‘How could you possibly have known, Shouqian?’

‘Is that the letter?’ Li asked and held out his hand.

Yang nodded and handed it to him. The envelope was unstamped. There was no address, just the name of Yang’s mother in clear, bold characters. Li slipped the letter out from inside. The paper was thin and close to tearing at the fold. Li opened it carefully. It was dated July 1970.

My dearest sister, Xi-wen,

I have received word today that my son, Tao, has graduated in the subject of political science at the University of Berkeley in California and is to stay on for another two years to complete his doctorate. I am so pleased for him. His success is assured and he will have no need ever to return here. In a sense it is all I have lived for since the death of my beloved husband. But it is still hard to think of him living somewhere on the other side of the world, watching the same sun rise and set, the same moon as I see on a clear night in Beijing, and not be able to speak or touch. I still remember the feel of him curled up inside me. But he is as removed from me now as my husband.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution seems to be entering a new phase of madness, with faction fighting faction. I am still disgraced because of our father’s history and my education and I have not been allowed to work at the kindergarten for nearly two years now. I am so weary of it all and wonder where it will end.

I have spent long hours going through the scraps of our lives before it all began. There is not much of it that has survived. A few photographs, some treasured letters that my husband and I exchanged in the months before we were married, a letter from Tao that, miraculously, reached us not long after he arrived in the United States. And this. It is the diary I kept for Tao after he left. It was meant to be a record for him of the things he missed and could catch up on when he returned.

I could not bring myself to continue with it after his father died. But I would like him to have it. He should know what happened to his family. I entrust it to you, because I know that you will keep it safe and see that Tao gets it when future circumstances allow.

Please tell him I love him. I am sorry for the trouble.

Your loving sister,

Ping Zhen.

Li looked up and found Yang watching him, that sense of shame returned to his eyes. ‘It was a crime back then,’ Yang said. ‘Chairman Mao described it as “alienating oneself from the people”.’ A tiny explosion of air escaped from his pursed lips. ‘Quite a euphemism. In reality what it meant was that we were not allowed a private room at the crematorium, we could not wear mourning armbands, or play funeral music. The whole family was made to feel the shame.’ And Li saw that he still felt it, even after all these years.

‘What happened?’ Li asked.

Yang shook his head. He could barely bring himself to recall the horror of it. ‘She threw herself out of the window and was impaled on the railings below. No one would go near her. Apparently she took hours to die.’ He met Li’s eye. ‘Tao never knew.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

I

Margaret’s ambivalence was more emotional than consciously thought out. And it wasn’t so much ambivalence as a sense of pleasure edged with guilt. But it was a serrated edge that made its presence felt disproportionate to its size. The net effect had been to cloud her pleasures of the night before with embarrassment the morning after.

She was annoyed, because she still felt warm and satisfied by a sexual encounter that had been all she could have hoped for. Michael had been a caring and sensitive lover, and she had surrendered herself completely to his ministrations. They had lain for a long time afterwards in each other’s arms and talked. About themselves, about their lives, although Margaret had still avoided the subject of the other Michael in her past. But he had not pressed her, and she had felt comfortable and relaxed with him, until she drifted off to sleep, aware as she did so of the myriad tiny kisses with which he was peppering her face and neck and breasts.

The difference a few short hours can make. Awakened from a deep sleep by their early alarm, she had been awkward and embarrassed with him. It was extraordinary how the day could cast such a different light upon events. Michael, on the other hand, had been attentive and affectionate, and if he was aware of her awkwardness, gave no sign of it.