The Man From Beijing (19 page)

He bowed.

‘It will give Guo Si and me great pleasure to help these gentlemen become better acquainted with the Chinese language.’

They started work the very next day. Elgstrand and Lodin wanted to invite San and Guo Si to their part of the ship, but San said no. He preferred to remain in the bow.

It was San who became the missionaries’ teacher. Guo Si spent most of the time sitting to one side, listening.

The two Swedish missionaries treated the brothers like equals. San was surprised that they were not undertaking this voyage in order to find work, or because they had been forced to leave. What drove these young men was a genuine desire and determination to save souls from eternal damnation. Elgstrand and Lodin were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their faith. Elgstrand came from a simple farming family, while Lodin’s father had been a rural minister. They pointed out on a map where they came from. They spoke openly, making no attempt to hide their simple origins.

When San saw the map of the world, he realised the full extent of their journey.

Elgstrand and Lodin were keen students. They worked hard and learned quickly. By the time the ship passed through the Bay of Biscay, they had established a routine involving lessons in the morning and in the late afternoon. San started asking questions about their faith and their God. He wanted to understand things about his mother that had been beyond his comprehension. She had known nothing about the Christian God, but she had prayed to other invisible higher powers. How could a person be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to make other people believe in the God that person worshipped himself ?

Elgstrand spoke more often, reinforcing the message that all men are sinners but could be saved and after death could enter paradise.

San thought about the hatred he felt for Zi, for Wang (who was probably dead) and for JA. Elgstrand maintained that the Christian God taught that the worst crime a man could commit was to kill a fellow human being.

San didn’t like that idea at all; his common sense told him that Elgstrand and Lodin couldn’t be right. All the time they talked about what was in store after death, but never about how a human life could be changed while it was being lived.

Elgstrand often came back to the idea that all human beings were equal. In the eyes of God everybody was a poor sinner. But San could not understand how, when the Day of Judgement dawned, he and Zi and JA could be assessed equally.

He was extremely doubtful. But at the same time he was pleasantly surprised by the kindness and apparently boundless patience the two young men from Sweden displayed towards him and Guo Si. He could also see that his brother, who often had private conversations with Lodin, seemed to be impressed by what he heard. As a result, San never initiated any discussions with Guo Si about his opinion of the white God.

Elgstrand and Lodin shared their food with San and Guo Si. San couldn’t know what was true and what wasn’t true when it came to their God, but he had no doubt that the two men lived in accordance with what they preached.

After thirty-two days at sea the
Nellie
called at Cape Town to replenish stores and rode at anchor in the shadow of Table Mountain before continuing southward. As they came to the Cape of Good Hope, they were hit by a severe southerly storm. The
Nellie
drifted for four days with sails taken in, riding the waves. San was terrified by the thought that the ship might sink, and he could see that the crew was scared as well. The only people on board who were completely calm were Elgstrand and Lodin. Or perhaps they concealed their fear well.

If San was scared, his brother was panic-stricken. Lodin sat with Guo Si throughout the whole of the raging storm. When it was over, Guo Si went down on bended knee and said he wanted to declare his belief in the God the white men were going to introduce to his Chinese brothers.

San was filled with even more admiration for the missionaries who had been so calm while the storm raged. But he couldn’t bring himself to do what Guo Si had done and kneel down to pray to a God that for him was still too mysterious and evasive.

They rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and favourable winds assisted their passage over the Indian Ocean. The weather became warmer, easier to cope with. San continued with his teaching, and every day Guo Si would go off with Lodin for their intimate, mumbled conversations.

But San knew nothing of what the future held. One day Guo Si suddenly fell ill. He woke San up during the night and whispered that he had started to cough up blood. Guo Si was deathly pale and shivering. San asked one of the sailors on night watch to fetch the missionaries. The man, who came from America and had a black mother but a white father, looked down at Guo Si.

‘Are you suggesting that I should wake up one of the gentlemen just because a coolie is lying here and bleeding?’

‘If you don’t, they will punish you tomorrow.’

The sailor frowned. He fetched Elgstrand and Lodin. They carried Guo Si to their cabin and laid him on one of the bunks. Lodin seemed to be the one who knew more about patient care and gave him several different medicines. San squatted back against the wall in the cramped cabin. The flickering light from the lantern cast shadows onto the walls. The ship progressed slowly through the swell.

The end came very quickly. Guo Si died as dawn broke. Before he breathed his last, Elgstrand and Lodin promised that he would be delivered unto God if he confessed his sins and affirmed his belief. They held his hands and prayed together. San sat by himself in the corner of the room. There was nothing he could do. His second brother had left him. But he couldn’t help but notice that the missionaries gave Guo Si a feeling of peace and assurance that he had never experienced before in his life.

San had difficulty understanding the last words Guo Si said to him. But he had the feeling Guo Si wasn’t afraid of death.

‘I’m leaving you now,’ said Guo Si. ‘I’m walking on water, like the man they call Jesus. I’m on my way to a different and a better world. Wu is waiting for me there. And you will come to join us one day.’

When Guo Si died, San sat with his head on his knees and his hands over his ears. He shook his head when Elgstrand tried to talk to him. Nobody could help him with the feeling of solitary impotence that overwhelmed him.

He returned to his place at the very front of the ship. Two members of the crew sewed Guo Si’s body into an old sail, together with some rusty iron nails as weights.

Elgstrand told San that the captain would conduct a sea burial two hours later.

‘I want to be together with my brother,’ said San. ‘I don’t want him to lie out there on deck before they drop him into the sea.’

Elgstrand and Lodin carried the body in its shroud of sailcloth into their cabin and left San alone with his brother. Guo Si would never return to China, but traditional beliefs made it essential for a part of his body to be buried there. San took a knife from the little table and carefully opened up the bottom of the package. He cut off Guo Si’s left foot. He was careful to make sure that no blood dripped onto the floor, tied a piece of cloth around the stump, then tied another piece of cloth around the foot, and put it inside his shirt. Then he repaired the hole in the sail. Nobody would be able to tell that it had been opened.

The captain and crew assembled by the ship’s rail. The sailcloth containing Guo Si’s body was placed on a plank resting on trestles. The captain took off his cap. He read from the Bible, then launched into a hymn. Elgstrand and Lodin joined in with powerful voices. Just as the captain was about to give the signal for the sailors to tip the body overboard, Elgstrand lifted his hand.

‘This simple Chinese man, Wang Guo Si, saw the light before he died. Even if his body will soon be on its way to the bottom of the ocean, his soul is free and already soaring over our heads. Let us pray to the God who looks after the dead and liberates their souls. Amen.’

When the captain gave the signal, San closed his eyes. He heard a distant splash as the body hit the water.

San returned to the place he and his brother had occupied during the voyage. He still couldn’t register that Guo Si was dead. Just when he’d thought that his brother’s will to live had been boosted, not least by the meeting with the two missionaries, Guo Si had been whisked away by an unknown illness.

The night after the sea burial San began the unpleasant task of cutting away skin and sinews and muscles from Guo Si’s foot. The only tool he had was an iron screw he’d found on deck. He threw the bits of flesh overboard. When the bones were clean, he rubbed them with a rag to dry them and hid them in his kitbag.

He spent the following week in solitary mourning. There were times when he thought the best thing he could do was to climb silently over the rail under cover of darkness and sink into the sea. But he had to take the bones of his dead brother back home.

When he started his lessons with the missionaries again, he could never stop thinking about how much they had meant to Guo Si. He hadn’t screamed his way into death; he had been calm. Elgstrand and Lodin had given Guo Si the most elusive thing of all: the courage to die.

During the rest of the voyage, first to Java where the ship replenished stores again, and then the final stretch to Canton, San asked a lot of questions about the God who could bring comfort to the dying, and who offered paradise to all, irrespective of whether they were rich or poor.

But the key question was why this God had allowed Guo Si to die just when he and San were on their way back home after all the hardship they had undergone. Neither Elgstrand nor Lodin could give him a satisfactory answer. The ways of the Christian God were inscrutable, Elgstrand said. What did that mean? That life was nothing more than waiting for what came next? That faith was in fact a riddle?

San was brooding as the ship approached Canton. He would never forget any of what he had been through. Now he wanted to learn to write, so that he could record what had happened in his life alongside his dead brothers, from the morning when he’d discovered his parents hanging from a tree.

A few days before they expected to see the Chinese coast, Elgstrand and Lodin came to sit down beside him on deck, wishing to know of his plans on arriving in Canton.

He had no answer.

‘We don’t want to lose touch with you,’ said Elgstrand. ‘We’ve become close during this voyage. Without you, our knowledge of Chinese would have been even more sketchy than it is. We’d like you to join us. We shall pay you a wage, and you will help us to build up the big Christian community we dream about.’

San sat in silence for quite a while before responding. When he’d made up his mind, he stood up and bowed twice to the missionaries.

He would go with them. Perhaps one day he would achieve the insight that had gilded Guo Si’s final days.

On 12 September 1867, San stepped ashore in Canton. In his kitbag were the bones from his dead brother’s foot. That was all he had to show for his long journey.

He looked around the quay. Was he searching for Zi or Wu? He didn’t know.

A few days later San accompanied the two Swedish missionaries on a riverboat to the town of Fuzhou. He contemplated the countryside drifting slowly by. He was looking for somewhere to bury the remains of Guo Si.

It was something he wanted to do alone. It was a matter between him, his parents and the spirits of his ancestors.

The riverboat sailed slowly northward. Frogs were singing on the banks.

San had come home.

15

In the autumn of 1868, San began with considerable effort to chronicle his story and that of his two dead brothers. Five years had passed since he and Guo Si had been abducted by Zi, and it was now a year since San had returned to Canton with Guo Si’s foot in a bag. During that year he had accompanied Elgstrand and Lodin to Fuzhou, had been in attendance as their personal servant and, thanks to a teacher arranged for him by Lodin, had learned to write.

The night San sat down and began writing his life story, a strong wind was rattling the windows of the house in which he had a room. He sat with his pencil in his hand, listening to the sounds and imagining himself back at sea.

It was only now that he was starting to grasp the significance of everything he’d been through. He made up his mind to recall and record every detail, skipping nothing.

Though who would read his story?

He had nobody to write for. And yet he wanted to do it. If there really was a Creator who ruled over the living and the dead, he would no doubt see to it that whatever San wrote would end up in the hands of somebody who wanted to read it.

San started writing, slowly and labouriously, while the winds made the walls creak. He swayed slowly back and forth on the stool he was sitting on. The room had soon turned into a ship, and the floor was moving under his feet.

He had placed several piles of paper on the table in front of him. Just like crayfish in the riverbed, he intended to work his way backward, to the point where he had seen his parents dangling on the end of ropes, swaying in the wind. But he wanted to start with the journey to the place where he was right now. That was the one most vivid in his memory.

Elgstrand and Lodin had been both exhilarated and nervous when they disembarked in Canton. The chaotic mass of people, strange smells and their inability to understand the special Hakka dialect spoken in the city made them insecure. They were expected – a Swedish missionary by the name of Tomas Hamberg was there to greet them: he worked for a German Bible society devoted to spreading Chinese translations of biblical texts. Hamberg was very hospitable and let them stay in the house in the German legation where he had his office and his flat. San played the role of the silent servant he had decided to assume. He took charge of the Chinese delegated to carry the missionaries’ baggage, washed his employers’ clothes, and saw to their needs at all hours of the day and night. Although he said nothing and kept in the background, he listened carefully to everything that was said. Hamberg spoke better Chinese than Elgstrand and Lodin and often spoke with them in order to help improve their fluency. Through a door standing ajar, San heard Hamberg asking Lodin about how they had come into contact with him. San was surprised to hear that Hamberg warned Lodin not to place too much trust in a Chinese servant.