The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(84)
The Club has also suffered other problems in the twentieth century, a large number of which are ideological. Its members have always been very proud of China, of their nation, and for several lives most will fight on this or that side during the prolonged civil war. However, eventually the more pragmatic members will come to realise that nothing they do will alter the course of events, and several leave, bitter and disappointed at the fate that awaits their country. Those who stay, and there are many indeed, are often caught up in a battle between national pride, an awareness of the bigger picture which many of their linear contemporaries lack, and the same ideological fervour which has so often destroyed the Club itself. When all you can see day in and day out are banners proclaiming the glory of communism, and your whole intellectual world is defined by this great rallying cry, against which you have no tool or defence, then, like a prisoner in a jail cell, those walls become your life. So it can be with the Beijing Cronus Club, and its members–fiery, passionate, angry, bitter, incensed, committed, rejected–carry a dubious reputation in the twentieth century. I am told that in the twenty-first the Club’s nature changes again, and it becomes more of a place for luxury and security, as it had been before, but I have never known those days.
Finding the Beijing Club at the best of times is tricky.
These were quite possibly the worst of all times to even consider looking, but to look I had no choice.
It took two months, and I was already beginning to struggle under the pressure of colleagues at the university whispering that Professor Sing-Song was not doctrinally correct. The doctrine I spouted was, in fact, absolutely correct for the times we lived in, but I had underestimated how quickly the times changed and, vitally, how much more important the interpretations of rivals were than the truth of what you said. I calculated I only had a few weeks until I was deported, and deportation would be the soft option.
When the message came through, it wasn’t a moment too late. It took the form of a small folded slip of paper under my door, written in Russian. It read, “Have met a friend. Drop by for tea, 6 p.m. beneath the lantern?”
“Beneath the lantern” was established code for a small teahouse, one of the very few teahouses still left in Beijing, which had been kept open largely for the benefit of the party elite and visiting scholars such as myself, to enjoy the service of attentive young women who could be extra-attentive for only a little more incentive. The madam of the teahouse wore a plain white robe at all times, but her hair was done up in a great crown of metal sticks and jewels, and I had never seen the smile falter, even for a second, on her wide round face. To show the teahouse’s commitment to the Great Leap Forward, all the low metal chairs on which guests had previously been sat had been contributed to industry, and now guests sat on red pillows on the floor. The move had been met with great praise from the party secretaries who drank there, and eventually a gift of twenty lacquered wooden seats from one secretary in particular, who found his knees could no longer handle sitting cross-legged.
I met my informant, one of the triad boys, on the corner of the tight alley where the teahouse resided. It was raining, the hard northern rain that blows in from Manchuria and makes the tiles of the curving roofs clatter with every heavy drop. He began to walk as I approached, and I fell in some fifty yards behind him, checking the streets as we moved through them for informers, eavesdroppers, surveillance. After ten minutes of this he slowed his pace for me to catch up, and we walked while talking beneath his umbrella, as the streets of the city bounced and sparkled with rushing water.
“I’ve found a soldier who’ll take you to the Cronus Club,” he whispered. “He says it must be only you.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I checked him out. He’s not with the PLA, even though he wears the uniform. He says to tell you that this is his seventh life. He said you would know what that means.”
I nodded. “Where do I meet him?”
“Tonight, Beihei, 2 a.m.”
“If I don’t contact you in twelve hours,” I replied, “you’re to pull out of the city.”
He nodded briskly. “Good luck,” he hissed and, with a single shake of my hand, slipped back into the darkness.
Beihei Park. In spring you can barely move for the throngs of people come to enjoy the fresh flowers and leaves on the trees. In summer the surface of the lake thickens with water lilies, and in winter the white stupa is disguised behind the frost in the trees.
At 2 a.m. in 1958 it is a good place to get into trouble.
I waited by the westernmost entrance to the park and monitored the progress of the rain as it seeped through my socks. I regretted that I had not seen Beihei in happier times and resolved that, should I live to the early 1990s, I would come back here as a tourist and do the things that tourists do, perhaps choosing an affably harmless passport to travel on, such as Norwegian or Danish. Surely even the most vehement of ideologues couldn’t find anything wrong with Norway?
A car came up the empty street towards me, and of course the car was for me. There were few enough cars on the streets of Beijing, and I felt no great surprise when it came to a stop directly in front of me, the door was pushed open, and a voice called out in clear, crisp Russian, “Please get in.”
I got in.
The interior of the car stank of cheap cigarettes. There was a driver in front, and another man in the passenger seat, a military cap pulled down across his forehead. I turned to the third man, who’d pushed open the rear door for me to get in. He was small, silver-haired, dressed in a neat grey tunic and trousers. He had a gun in one hand, and a sack, also smelling of cigarette smoke, in the other. “Please forgive this,” he said as he pulled the sack over my head.