The Year of Dangerous Loving. John Davis Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ it only takes a military coup to put Communism back on the throne and then everything’s ruined again. And China’s massive army is all the Party faithful. There was a coup against Gorbachev, and against Yeltsin. And what about this New Communist Party in Russia?’

      ‘No,’ Olga said, walking along with head lowered pensively, ‘the spirit is out of the bottle, the people will never accept Communism again.’

      ‘China put the genie back in the bottle very effectively at the Tiananmen Square massacre, didn’t they?’

      Olga tapped her head. ‘“Genie”, that is the word, not “spirit”. Yes, but that was the political genie, not the money genie. A thousand million Chinese will not let the genie go back into the bottle with their money.’

      ‘Mao Tse-tung,’ Hargreave said, ‘and the Bolsheviks made a pretty good job of it. The guy behind the machine-gun is always right. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see them doing it in Statue Square, Hong Kong.’

      Then they came around the corner of the Praia Grande and there, towering up thirty storeys high, dwarfing all the buildings around it, was the new steel and glass tower of the official Bank of China. ‘There, darling,’ Olga pointed, ‘is the reason they will not go back to Communism!’

      Yes, it was reassuring, like the new Bank of China building in Hong Kong; it tended to show that the Chinese took commercial stability seriously now that Deng had proclaimed, ‘To become rich is glorious’ – but if Hargreave were a businessman he would wait and see before investing his millions. Olga said: ‘And have you seen all the factories just beyond the Barrier Gate?’

      No, he hadn’t, but he’d heard about it – and he’d seen the same thing across the Hong Kong border, in the new Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in the Samchun Valley where a few years ago there had been only sleepy paddy fields. Now the valley was covered in factories and apartment blocks and businessmen from around the world were setting up industries there because land, building costs and labour were so cheap. Yet just over the border, in Hong Kong, only ten or twelve miles away as the crow flies, on the most expensive real estate in the world the same damn thing was happening. It didn’t make long-term sense. Hargreave was no businessman but it seemed to him that there had to be a levelling of the two sets of values, and surely Hong Kong’s had to go down?

      Olga said: ‘And now let’s go to my old Macao, where I live; I love it.’

      They walked hand-in-hand up the narrow, crowded streets, the grubby Chinese tenements on both sides, their signboards fighting each other up to the sky, the shops selling everything from silks and hi-fi gear down to lizards’ tails, through the smells of gutters and restaurants and spices and butchers and incense and smoke and urine, through the coolies and shopkeepers and urchins and mangy dogs and scrawny cats and the hammering and the yammering and the clattering of mah-jong, until they came to a tailor’s shop near the old Central Hotel. Olga pointed up at the top floor of the joyless tenement building opposite.

      ‘Those are my windows. It is old-fashioned but nice inside. I would take you in but my girlfriends are asleep now. I like it here because it is the old China, so much life everywhere. And I would like to show you my cats.’

      ‘Cats? How many have you got?’

      ‘About twenty, but they are not really mine, they live on the roof. Every day I feed them there and they are very grateful. I will show you another time, darling, when I cook you a nice Russian stew. But –’ she held up a finger – ‘I am learning Chinese cooking too; perhaps I must give you that, to impress you.’

      ‘I’m already impressed.’

      ‘Yes, but that is in bed – I mean in the kitchen.’

      Hargreave grinned. ‘Do you like your flatmates, the girls?’

      ‘Oh yes, they are very nice. Yolanda is my good friend, she comes from Vladivostok, she spent all her life in the orphanage, since a baby – I was lucky. But she is so stupid, always falling in love with silly men.’ She grinned: ‘Not like me, who only falls in love with very important lawyers.’

      She led him through the narrow, jostling, odoriferous streets, till they came to a squat, modern, white building with sheet-iron gates guarded by two lucky red flag-ensembles draped in yellow flowers. A small white sign on the wall read: Missionaries of Charity.

      ‘This is my favourite place. This is where the Sisters of Mother Teresa work.’ She looked at him. ‘And a few years ago Mother Teresa herself came here, and said it was her best mission in the world!’

      Hargreave was taken aback by her enthusiasm. ‘So you’re really not an atheist?’

      ‘Yes, I am an atheist, that’s what I was taught at school, but Mother Teresa is wonderful because she is so kind – she won the Nobel Peace Prize! She gives her life to the poor people. Such sacrifice! So good. Here they look after anybody, food, clothes, bed, find a job. I always give money to Mother Teresa, and any old clothes the girls don’t want, even stockings and suspenders! Look.’ She burrowed her hand into her brassière and pulled out a hundred-pataca banknote. She marched through the open gates, up to the door, and slipped it in through the letterbox. ‘See? Even though I don’t believe in gods.’

      ‘None at all?’ Hargreave grinned.

      Olga cupped her hands to her mouth and gave a whisper-shout at Mother Teresa: ‘That’s from both of us this week.’ She giggled and put her arm around him and then led him off down the street. ‘Do you?’ she asked.

      ‘Yes. One.’

      ‘The Christian one?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Not the Buddhist one?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Not at all?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Not the littlest bit? Even the possibility? Such Christian arrogance, darling! So only you are right, all the stupid Orientals are wrong? What about Allah?’

      Hargreave smiled: ‘God and Allah are the same god. Just different names given by different prophets.’

      ‘But only your prophet is right? Poor Mohammed and Buddha, they made a big fat mistake? So you all fight each other, to prove who is right, ever since the Romans. Ever since King Henry VIII chopped the head off his poor wife to make himself the highest priest of England! And now today you are still fighting the Arabs who say you are infidels. Really,’ she squeezed him, ‘you religious people surprise me. Such arrogance, darling!’

      ‘That’s what they taught you at school?’

      ‘It’s not true?’

      ‘So you reject all of it, because of its gruesome history?’

      ‘Pathetic history, darling! Shameful But …’ She stopped and pointed up at the sky as Chinese thronged past them: ‘See that up there? That is infinity! It goes on for ever. No end. With millions of worlds? With billions of millions of creatures. Who made all that?’ Her eyes widened. ‘It is so amazing to think about it that you must decide that somebody made it. And that is what men call God. Or Allah,’ she added. ‘Or Buddha.’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ