Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  He told the driver to take him to his parents’ place, in the centre, but then changed his mind, still not knowing what to say to them. He asked to be dropped at Saint Sophia Cathedral, a few blocks away from home. He walked aimlessly in the square beneath its huge onion dome and crosses, until he could no longer feel his fingers. Then he went inside to thaw. It was Russian Orthodox, dating from 1907, but was no longer a going concern, now being a museum.

  Once some life had returned to his fingers, he decided he couldn’t put off seeing his parents any longer. He left the cathedral and walked several blocks to the south, crossing a central walking street, picking his way through the stream of huddled figures, who moved slowly in the cold, their breath turning to clouds of steam.

  He passed the city’s old synagogue and through a rusting gateway that led to a small courtyard surrounded by low-rise apartment blocks. He paused in front of a five-storey red brick building, and looked up at the windows of his parents’ place on the third floor. He saw a faint light. They must be at home. That was a good sign, but he was feeling so nervous that he almost retreated. Eventually he steeled himself and entered the dark doorway, climbing stairs so icy that he had to feel his way along the wall for support.

  When he reached the door of the apartment he could hear what sounded like the television. He rang the doorbell and stood back. But nobody answered the door. Nobody moved the other side. He rang again. Still nothing. So he reached under the doormat feeling for the little pouch that his parents had stitched into the mat for a spare key. The key was there and he let himself in, bolting the door behind him.

  He called out. There was no reply.

  It was a small apartment, just three rooms: a bedroom, kitchen and a living room, where his father had blocked off a small area as a study. It had a homely feel about it. Shelves stacked with books. Pictures, landscapes mostly, but also old photos of the family together, the three of them in Tiananmen Square, in Harbin, on a visit to Shanghai. Mostly from before university, when Wang could be bothered to make the effort.

  The kitchen light was on, and there was some sort of quiz show on the clunky old television in the corner, a bunch of kids shouting answers at a host with a permanent grin as wide as the big wheel he was spinning.

  Wang sat down, and it was then he saw the bible on the floor beside the sofa, which he picked up and opened to find a written inscription to his mother on the inside cover, urging her to be strong, to keep the faith. Which surprised him. He always saw his mother as a strong person, and never knew she had any faith.

  The apartment smelt of tobacco. Another odd thing. Neither of his parents smoked. He saw two cigarette butts ground into the wooden floor. There were two more in a half-filled coffee mug by his feet.

  He walked over to his father’s desk. There were papers spread on the desk, course notes, and lecture preparations for the Party School, that sort of stuff. One was entitled Communist Ethics and was blank apart from the title. Another was called Returning Frugality to the Party. That appeared to be a work in progress too. Beside it was a thick book by the Party leader. It was open at a chapter headed, “Towards a Law-Based Society”. He thought about the Professor who had disappeared, The Girl In The Corner, the old holdout, and his own detention; he assumed something must have been lost in translation. Did his dad really believe all this stuff?

  Then he saw a much bigger document on a shelf above the desk, roughly bound. He took it down and began to leaf through its thick wad of hand-written pages, his father’s writing. He took it back to the sofa, where he lay down and began to read, quickly finding himself immersed in a harrowing story of cruelty and suffering, starvation and cannibalism. And death. Death everywhere on an unimaginable scale.

  It took him a while to realise that what he was reading was not some grotesque piece of fiction, but a series of transcripts of interviews by his father with the survivors of a terrible catastrophe. And it was all set in his father’s hometown, which would have been little more than a village when the events took place, between 1958 and 1960. It was an attempt by his father to construct a village history of those terrible years, though it wasn’t a history Wang recognised. In school, the famine of that period had been largely glossed over, and if it was mentioned at all it was as a natural disaster, all the result of bad weather.

  Yet what he was reading was not an accident of nature, but the direct result of a Party policy that herded people into communes and killed and tortured those who resisted. His father estimated that half his village had died, including many of his own relatives.

  And in Wang’s mind it led to all sorts of other questions. His father had been born ten years after the events he was describing, though Wang’s grandparents would have lived through it. Why had his father set out to investigate those years? It wasn’t clear when he had started his interviews and began this massive undertaking. Wang wondered whether that was the reason his parents had moved from the area so suddenly when he was a child, that perhaps his questions had hit a raw and powerful nerve.

  Yet his father continued to serve the Party, even after all that he’d learned about his village. That made no sense either. With each turning page, the suffering was unrelenting. Yet he read on until he was close to finishing but could no longer keep his eyes open. He fell asleep on the sofa, his father’s harrowing manuscript on his chest, thinking how little he really knew about either of his parents.

  – 33 –

  Ice City

  Wang was woken by a noise outside the apartment door, something heavy and metallic dropped on the concrete floor. Then voices, angry but trying to keep the volume down, and in a dialect he didn’t immediately understand.

  Then he heard tapping, the door straining.

  They were trying to force their way in.

  He sat up on the sofa, his heart pounding. His father’s manuscript fell to the living room floor, hitting it with a thud, but the sound was drowned out by the creaking of another door opening on the landing outside and a voice shouting, wanting to know what was going on. The men outside Wang’s door said to take it easy, they were friends of the family.

  Wang edged slowly to the door, silently opening the peephole, its tiny fish-eye giving him a wide view of the gloomy hallway outside. The first thing he saw was the back of a padded orange jacket, the man from the train, and to his left the other one, in the black woollen coat. The man from the neighbouring apartment was standing in his doorway yelling that friends don’t break into apartments.

  An elderly woman then appeared on the stairwell. She’d come up from an apartment below and immediately threatened to call the police. She had a smartphone in her hand, which she raised to photograph the intruders. The man in the orange jacket grabbed it from her hand and threw it hard to the concrete floor, where it smashed into several pieces.

  But the woman was quickly in his face, yelling, a finger prodding the orange jacket.

  “You think you can just walk in here and force your way into somebody’s home?”

  Which the man clearly did. He just sneered and pushed her aside. She fell to the floor beside the remains of her smartphone, and the two men walked past her and back down the stairs as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  The man from the neighbouring apartment helped the woman to her feet. She’d grazed her arm on a sharp corner of the stairwell as she fell, but insisted she’d be all right, refusing his offer to take her to hospital.

  “But we should call the police,” she said.

  “Suppose they are the police?” the man said, and the woman said he had a point.

  Wang silently closed the peephole and sat back on the sofa.

  He doubted they were cops. Otherwise why leave? Cops could do whatever they wanted. And the dialect they’d spoken to each other, he was sure that was Cantonese, from the south of China. Why would they follow him all the way to Harbin?

&
nbsp; The one thing he did know for sure was that he needed to leave his parents’ apartment, and quickly.

  He glanced at his phone. It was six thirty in the morning and still pitch black outside. He gathered his things and replaced his father’s manuscript on the shelf where he’d found it. Then he looked again through the papers on his father’s desk, finding a sheet of headed paper for the Party School with no address, but a phone number.

  From a table beside the sofa he picked up a leaflet with a child’s drawing of a dragon on the front beneath the words “Donfeng Road Kindergarten Welcomes You”. Inside were pictures of kids playing in the snow, kids drawing, kids singing. It was the place his mother worked and the leaflet seemed to have been produced for an open day. There was no phone number, but still Wang figured there was enough for him to find it.

  He put it in his pocket with the Party School headed paper and, after checking that the hallway was clear, he left the apartment, replaced the key under the mat, and went slowly and silently down the stairs. He waited for a while just inside the main entrance of the block. He couldn’t see clearly out of the compound, but figured he’d have to take a chance. He pulled his woollen hat low over his ears, raised his collar and adjusted his scarf to just beneath his eyes. Then he walked out of the gate and onto the dark street beside the old synagogue.

  He had no real plan. It was too early to visit the kindergarten or to try phoning the Party School, and he was still not sure how he would approach either. So he walked towards the river, along a road lined with darkened low-rise buildings. The traffic was still light and he paused in doorways each time a car or bus passed, belching clouds of exhaust.

  He then went down into a wide underpass, and as he walked he heard a strange tapping, like a misfiring engine or the frantic typing on a keyboard. It got louder as he walked. Then he heard the sound of running, though in fits and starts. He stopped, close to a sharp turn in the underpass and jumped as a hand gripped his shoulder.

  “Hey, sorry to startle you,” said a young man wearing a heavy grey coat over a jogging suit. “Are you coming to play?”

  Wang followed the man around the corner, where the tapping was getting louder and faster. Dozens of people stood in circles, bats in hands, tapping small balls back and forth to each other, cheering as they kept the balls from hitting the ground.

  “It’s the best place to play right now,” said the man. “Where you won’t freeze to death. Come and have a game.”

  Wang said thanks, some other time, and continued through the underpass, exiting onto the broad bank of the frozen Songhua River, now a vast expanse of ice and snow. There was now some light in the sky, a cloudless morning, a dull blue above, and a rusty-coloured haze on the horizon. Smoke and steam from a power station on the distant far bank rose in a near vertical plume in the still and frigid morning air.

  Wang walked along the bank, which was lined with makeshift ice rinks and slides. Two young boys were already on one slide, hurtling across the ice on plastic sledges, braving the bitter pre-dawn temperatures.

  He was startled by a chain saw, wielded by a man in a coat so thick it made him look twice his size. He was carving big slabs of ice, pulled from the river, to be used to make the ice sculptures for which Harbin was famous.

  Shortly after he’d moved here with his parents, when he was eleven, the river had become so contaminated that the water supply was shut down for days. There were rumours of an accident at a chemical plant. But back then not so many people were online, and nobody ever knew for sure what had happened. Wang reckoned that if it happened again today then everybody would know, or at least they’d think they knew.

  Wang’s fingers and toes were beginning to ache and turn numb from the cold when he found a small dumpling restaurant, a simple place of plastic tables and ugly strip lights. He took a seat at the back and ordered a dozen dumplings with pork and leek, which he smothered in vinegar and chilli.

  Then he phoned the number he had for the Party School.

  The phone rang five times before it was answered.

  “Yes,” a woman said.

  “Is that the Party School?” Wang asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “I am looking for my friend. I believe he works there. A teacher. Mr Wang Lixian.”

  “We no longer have a Wang Lixian working here.”

  “Really?” said Wang, taken aback. “Are you sure?”

  The woman said of course she was sure, and who is this?

  And Wang said, “Just a friend”, and hung up.

  He then opened a navigation app on his phone and was pleased to find that Donfeng Road was close by. So he paid for the dumplings and left the restaurant, guided by the app.

  The kindergarten was in an old turn-of-the-century building with chipped columns and a weathered brown facade. A plaque near the door said it was Heritage Architecture, built at the turn of the century by the Russians, when they were in control of Harbin.

  He entered through a metal blue door close to where an old caretaker was pasting a notice to the wall. Wang said good morning and asked about his mother. The man continued with the poster, which was for a student ice sculpture competition and showed a big bear carved from ice. Wang guessed the man was just hard of hearing, tapped his shoulder and repeated his question.

  “She’s my mother. I am trying to find her. I’m visiting from Beijing.”

  “Beijing?” said the caretaker. “Is it cold there too?”

  “Not as cold as here. Nowhere is as cold as here,” Wang said. “My mother?”

  The caretaker shrugged, turning his face towards the door. In the light he looked as weathered as the building.

  “They’ve all gone to the ice,” he said. “Everyone’s at the festival today.”

  Wang thanked him and left.

  Harbin might be lacking in a whole lot of other ways, but they knew how to make the most of their snow and ice. The winter revolved around it.

  Wang soon reached a park by the river, where he followed a path along a line of intricately carved ice sculptures of animals, musical instruments and wild mythical creatures.

  He stopped at another made from packed snow, a boy sitting on the trunk of a sports car and working his smartphone. Wang thought that was pretty cool.

  Nearby, visitors were posing for selfies at a grand piano carved from the ice, alongside a big ice chariot drawn by four galloping ice horses.

  That’s where he saw a group of children, kindergarten kids he guessed, though they were so heavily wrapped up they looked like they’d been pumped full of air. A teacher was carrying a little flag on which was written “Donfeng Road Kindergarten”.

  Wang introduced himself and the teacher said she was sorry but his mother hadn’t been to work for at least two days now and she had no idea why. Perhaps she was sick. Wang said thanks and gave her his phone number, asking her to phone him if she heard anything more.

  “Sure,” said the teacher, looking anxious beneath a big fluffy blue bobble hat. She turned away quickly because her kids were now throwing snowballs at passers-by and rolling in the snow, taking advantage of the teacher being distracted.

  Then somebody grabbed Wang from behind, gripping his left arm so tight he wondered if a dog had snapped its jaws around him, just above the elbow. He spun round and was looking into the eyes of the man with the orange padded coat. The cold had turned his scar a bright pink. With all the strength he could muster, Wang pulled his left arm away and pushed hard with his right. The man slipped and tumbled backwards, knocking over a cart of steaming toffee apples.

  And Wang just ran. First up a series of steps made of ice, leading to the sculptured ramparts of a giant ice castle. He pushed to the front of a line of kids waiting at the top of an ice slide, the quickest way down. He turned to see the two men from the train, the men who’d tried to break
into his parents’ apartment, following him up, though struggling to keep their footing on the ice.

  Wang slid back down to the bottom. The two men pushed through after him, but hesitated at the top, mothers glaring at them. They decided to take the steps back down; the one in orange slipped again and bounced down on his backside.

  “Are you okay?” said three women at the bottom, waiting for their kids to come down the slide and stretching out hands to help him to his feet. He waved them away, saying of course he was fucking okay, but when he went to stand he slipped again, by which time his sidekick in black was by his side and doing the helping, which he found more acceptable than having the women help him up.

  “How can anybody live in this fucking climate?” he said.

  Wang entered a coffee shop to one side of the sculptures. It was a long narrow building packed mostly with groups thawing out, and he took a seat on a bench among older students. But the two men had seen him and followed him in, needing some thawing themselves, sitting a few benches away, near the door, removing their hats and gloves.

  As the students got up to leave, Wang moved with them, and as they passed the bench where the men were sitting, Wang pushed one of the students, who fell on the man in the black coat, who swore and tried to push him off. At the same time Wang made a lunge for their gloves and hats, grabbing them and racing to the door, throwing them in a garbage bin just outside.

  He figured that as southerners they’d be struggling with the cold anyway. Without gloves and hats they wouldn’t last too long in the open.

  At least that’s what he hoped.

  They followed him out, and after passing a giant ice mosque, a ship and a towering image of the Buddha made of packed snow, Wang joined a tour group, pushing his way to the middle of them, hoping he’d be concealed in the crowd.