A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [124]
“Let’s hear it.”
“Soon enough, Professor.” Wang Bin walked slowly around the desk. Knots bit into Stratton’s flesh. He would break the chair. It was only wood.
Stratton saw the punch coming out of the corner of an eye: there was nothing he could do. A knobby fist smashed into his cheekbone. Stratton tasted blood.
“My brother,” Wang Bin said calmly, “was a fool who could see the truth but chose to ignore it. Even as a child he was a sanctimonious fraud. One year older he was, that is all. Is that a century? Does one year bestow wisdom? Ah, but how David loved to play the elder, he the superior and I the inferior, the ignorant younger brother. My mother and father, they were fooled by him, like everyone else. …
“Once I broke a vase, a beautiful Ming vase. It sat there on a polished wooden table, beautiful and ludicrous. And I broke it, perhaps even intentionally. I smashed it into a million pieces.” Wang Bin paused, with a curious smile. “Like all children, I was afraid of what my parents would do. So I told my mother that a delivery-man—an old man who brought fresh crabs to the house—had carelessly broken the vase with his sack. She believed me. But that was not good enough for my brother. He went to Mother and said, ‘It was I, your eldest son, who broke the vase, Mother. Bin is only trying to protect me. I take responsibility.’ Did they beat him? No, of course not. ‘What an honest boy you are,’ they said.
“And did David then beat me, or mock me to show me how much braver he was? No. He never said a word, nothing, as though by making me wallow in my shame I would drown. Just as he never said a word to me those days when I would skip my piano lessons and come back only to find him playing my exercises, so that downstairs my mother would hear it and think how dedicated I was, just like my elder brother.”
Stratton said, “Why are you here?”
Wang Bin sat down once more at the desk. “We have time for that, Professor, plenty of time.”
Stratton worked the knots at his wrists. “So you were a jealous little brother,” he prodded. “That’s your explanation.”
“For murder?” Wang Bin seemed amused. “No.”
“How could you hate him so much?”
“I am not sure I did. Not at the end.” His voice was level, emotionless. “The day finally came for my big brother to leave for the United States. How sad was my mother, how proud my father. All the servants wept, and I wept, too. I wept for the joy of it, Professor Stratton. He was gone and I would be the elder son. My parents thought I wept from sadness. How I fooled them! My father took me aside and said, ‘Bin, do not weep. You must be strong and brave like your brother and in another year, perhaps two, you will join him to study.’ I never would have gone. To follow him. In anything. Never. How little my father understood of me, or of China.
“When my mother left for the Revolution I joined her instantly. Here was something my brother could not do, or my father. To fight a revolution. War is very exciting, Professor Stratton. Do you remember how the skin tingles, the senses race? I was barely sixteen—imagine, not yet sixteen!—and I would call my soldiers and say, ‘Comrades, we must take that bridge. The people’s struggle demands it.’ And they would say, ‘Yes, Comrade,’ and they would march with fifty-year-old rifles into artillery and machine-gun fire. They would die unflinching, uncomplaining, with a mindless zeal that someone like you would admire. I loathed their stupidity. And I loathed the Revolution, too. Loved and loathed it.
“It should have been a bright dream, a dream so great my brother could never have known its like. Instead it was a theater of the absurd. ‘Yes, Comrade, we will go off and die because the people demand it.’ Is it heroic to roll in the mud like a pig when you can be clean, or to march through snow in bare feet when you can ride? It was a peasants’ revolution. The peasants won. And ever since,