The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [93]
Years of sullen silence followed. Artists stopped painting, poets produced no verse, the great storytellers were either wise enough to tell no stories or told them to themselves inside their cells. The once-unbuttoned city buttoned itself up tightly and waited for this long afternoon rain to end.
Neal Carey heard a lot about Chengdu’s history from Xiao Wu. Xiao Wu talked nonstop for three straight days as he took Neal around to every sight of any possible significance in the greater Chengdu area. It was marathon tourism, an endurance event. Neal wondered if Wu was just that proud of his hometown, or whether it was William Frazier that was on display and not the city. Maybe Wu was just drunk with the power of having a car, a driver, and the chance to practice his English.
Not that Neal minded all that much. Cooped up as he had been for three months, it felt great to be out in the warm sun, and if the sultry summer air wasn’t exactly invigorating, it wasn’t exactly painful either. And it felt wonderful to walk. At first his leg muscles sent him messages in the form of pins and needles, and he needed to rest a lot. But after the first morning he found that he and Xiao Wu were taking longer jaunts away from the government car, and that his legs seemed to be waking up from their long sleep.
And they did cover some ground, because Wu seemed unwilling for his guest to miss a single temple, shrine, park, panda, or rare bamboo plant in the city.
Some of it was great, like on that first wonderful morning. He had sprung out of bed like a kid at Christmas, bolted breakfast down, and was dressed and ready half an hour before Wu knocked on the door. Wu was excited also. This was his first important assignment, he explained, and he also confessed that it would be only the second time he had ever ridden in a private automobile. He hurried Neal through the hotel lobby and into the waiting car. The driver was a middle-aged man in a green Mao jacket, and he went to such great lengths not to appear to be listening that Neal made him for a fink right off the bat.
Wu launched into his soliloquy right away.
“You can now see the outside of the Jinjiang Guest House,” he said before the driver started the engine.
“It’s nice to see the outside of something,” Neal said. Even the Jinjiang Guest House, which was a boring rectangular concrete box.
“The Russians designed it,” Wu said, as if reading Neal’s mind. He leaned over the seat and gave some directions to the driver, then looked at Neal with an expression that could only be described as “thrilled.” It occurred to Neal that he thought of Xiao Wu as a kid, even though they were roughly the same age.
That first morning they drove west along the north bank of the Nan River to Caotang Park, “home of the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu,” Wu explained as they got out of the car in a small parking lot surrounded by tall bamboo trees. They walked for few minutes and came to a small shrine beside a narrow creek. Wu explained that the shrine had been built to honor Du Fu, and that the only reason it wasn’t torn down by the Red Guard was that Mao had once written two lines of verse honoring the ancient poet.
“He was born in 712 and died in 770, but the shrine was not built until sometime around the year 1100.”
Neal flipped through his mental reference cards. Du Fu was writing poetry around the time of Charlemagne, and this shrine had been built to honor him around the time William the Conqueror had fought the battle of Hastings. When my Irish ancestors