Into xinjiang, p.5
Into Xinjiang, page 5
Just two shops further along the road, Dan found a small barber’s shop. The proprietor was an old man with a long beard and shaved head. He wore an embroidered doppa and long brown gown. Dan gestured that he wanted to shave his head, just like another man who stood nearby. He gave Dan a large, toothless smile and gestured for him to sit in the torn brown leather chair that stood out on the street. Dan watched carts and tricycles pass him as the barber began to shave his head with a long cut-throat razor. Within no more than ten minutes, Dan’s long hair was gone and his head was completely shaved. The man held up a cracked mirror for Dan to inspect his work. It was perfect – he didn’t even recognise himself.
It had just gone quarter past ten. Dan paid the man, tipping the same amount again, and pulled his black hat over his head. The gratitude in the man’s eyes was clear, and the feeling was mutual – Dan felt the same for his radical change of image.
At the same time, in a leafy suburb of Beijing, Zhou Jun and his family were preparing to leave for Singapore. Their bags had been packed and were being carried to a fleet of three waiting cars by a team of smartly dressed young men who hurried between the house and the vehicles. At a small airfield just outside the city a private jet was being prepared for take-off. Zhou Jun couldn’t be happier with how things were progressing.
Returning to the Drum Tower, Dan flagged down the first taxi that passed. He pointed to the word “station” in his book and sat back, running his hands over his newly shaven head. He hoped to God that the station was free of police by now given that they knew they had lost him. At that very moment, a patrol car came screaming past them in the other direction. Dan ducked down in the seat trying to hide himself. His heart was racing again, partly from this game of chase, partly in the knowledge that the train he was heading for was due to depart in just twenty-five minutes’ time and he still had to buy a ticket.
They arrived at the station in good time. Dan paid the driver and walked confidently across the piazza again, his throat dry and tight as he entered the station building, clenching his fist tightly around the strap of his backpack. The large entrance hall was teeming with people waiting for their trains to be called. It took a moment or two but he spotted the ticket counter and began picking his way through the crowds to reach it. He had just over twenty minutes until the train was due to leave and there was a lengthy queue for tickets. His heart was pounding; if he missed this train he would be stuck in Xi’an.
It took around ten minutes to reach the front of the queue. He moved quickly up to the window and produced his notebook on which he had written “K591 – Dunhuang. 10:53. Soft Sleeper”. The man on the other side of the window barely made eye contact but turned to look at the wall clock behind him. 10:44. Dan paid the fee of five hundred and eighty-eight yuan and the man circled “Platform 12” for him in black biro. Dan thanked him and turned around. As he did, he found himself staring straight at two uniformed members of the People’s Armed Police who had appeared beside him. They asked to see his ticket. His hands were visible shaking as he passed them his boarding pass. They looked at the ticket, at each other, shook their heads and passed the ticket back to him, waving him on his way. He stood motionless for a second, hardly daring to breathe as he tried to gather his composure.
Dan picked up his bag, made an overly deliberate gesture of looking at his watch and began to run, darting through the crowds of Chinese passengers, taking care not to crash into anyone as he searched for platform twelve. His head was fuzzy and the sounds of the busy concourse began to fade as he made his way through the crowds. With just two minutes to spare he found platform twelve and clambered aboard the train at the first door he could find. The female conductor who greeted him indicated that he was in the wrong carriage so he walked through three or four other cars, just as the train began to pull out of the station. Dan made his way to his cabin door unsure what he was going to find on the other side of it.
Inside, two young Chinese women sat on the lower bunk on the right-hand side of the cabin. His bed was on the left. Both women wore black faux leather jackets and black jeans, their lips painted with bright red lipstick. Between the two women was a young boy of around eight dressed in blue tracksuit trousers and a grubby white T-shirt. The three turned to look at Dan as he entered the cabin and smiled politely at him. He returned the smile before remembering that it was two young Chinese women who got him into this situation in the first place. The boy stared at him transfixed.
Ten minutes later, the train was trundling through the suburbs of Xi’an. Dan’s brief stay in the city had been frantic; he had only narrowly escaped from the police at the station on arrival, and he still had no idea what role the conductor on the train had played in that. He had checked into a hotel for two nights, booked false onward arrangements to Guilin, eaten breakfast and fundamentally changed his appearance. All of this had happened in the space of just two hours or so. As he lay there, his mind spinning and heart pounding, Dan felt delirious. He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep, exhausted.
He woke sometime later as the conductor entered the cabin, asking for tickets. She tucked Dan’s into her book under a tab that said “Dunhuang”, smiled and left. It was her job to come and wake the passengers when the time arose. Dan sat on his bed looking out of the window. They had left the urban sprawl behind and the countryside had opened up into dusty villages of red-brick shacks. Dusty asphalt roads lined with dusty trees dissected dusty farmlands. Much as he had seen earlier this morning, rusting metal bridges crossed convulsing brown rivers. He got up and left the compartment, walking to the end of the carriage where the windows in the doors opened. Dan pushed the window down and cautiously put his head outside. Despite being early afternoon the air was cool as they travelled north-west. Before long they would be in the Hexi Corridor. To the south of him would be the high and inhospitable Tibetan Plateau and beyond that the highest mountains in the world. To the north, separated by the shifting sands of the Gobi, would lie the vast steppe grasslands and big skies of Mongolia. He felt the history of the Silk Route weigh heavy on his shoulders as he pictured the caravans that once travelled through here in both directions, laden with not only silk from Xi’an and goods from Europe but language, knowledge and culture. This was one of the most significant vascular systems of interaction in the history of mankind and he felt humbled to be travelling through it. It was responsible for the mixing of east and west, but he was here as a fugitive from the east, desperately trying to make his way west. Pangs of sadness kicked in as it dawned on him that he was ever unlikely to return to explore it properly. He stood for an hour watching the landscape go by from the window. It rarely changed, but the scale of the factories that appeared from nowhere, dwarfing the villages they towered over, never failed to both surprise and appal him. Great white clouds of smoke and steam spewed skywards while all around farmlands produced crops for the factory workers. It was a vicious ecosystem of ill health that would, he suspected, ultimately lead to the factory’s own demise.
Dan returned to his cabin to find the two young women lying on their bunks. The boy was asleep on the lower bed curled up next to one of them. The weight of the situation slowly began to sink in and Dan started to imagine what it would be like if the police ever caught him. Where and how violent would his capture be? Would he even be caught alive? If they didn’t shoot him during his arrest where would he be imprisoned? What horrors would he find behind the high walls of Chinese incarceration? Would he be mistreated? Would he become one of those prisoners you hear about, decaying in far off countries beyond the reach of British diplomatic intervention? Would it make the news back home?
Every single one of these questions scared him, so he resolved to stop thinking about all the “what ifs”. He had eluded capture thus far and the only thing to tie him to this train was the one ticket he had purchased. There was more to suggest that he was heading south to Guilin and Hong Kong, or even still in Xi’an. It struck him then that he had forgotten to withdraw any more money before he left. The next time he used his card, they would see exactly where he was. This was a big oversight and he berated himself for it in his head. He only managed to calm down when he remembered how close he had been to missing this train as it was, but he needed cash without accessing his bank account. He had a little over two thousand yuan left on him and it was going fast.
Every centimetre this train moved, the closer he was to freedom. He started to imagine what it would be like to walk across that border into Kyrgyzstan, picturing a mountain pass, rugged and barren on the Chinese side, falling away to the freedom of vast meadows and snow-capped peaks on the Kyrgyz side. He imagined walking through waist-high grasses, allowing alpine flowers to flow through his hands as he wandered. He pictured horses grazing and crystal clear streams trickling along pebble-strewn riverbeds. This whole image motivated him intensely; it was the very freedom he was fighting for with every breath in his body. Despite his total exhaustion, he felt reinvigorated to succeed.
Gradually, Dan became aware that the sky outside the train was darkening. His watch showed that it was approaching seven o’clock. It was too early to be getting this dark. Sunset wasn’t due for another hour or so. This was a different kind of ambience; there was something more sinister about the colour of the sky. Within minutes, the train burst into urban sprawl again. Vast factories now filled the view from the window, gargantuan and numerous. Dan could see the fumes that were spilling from the forest of chimneys becoming mixed into the low cloud that hung over the approaching city. They were approaching Lanzhou – one of the most polluted cities in the world. The train began to slow and there was a knock at the door. The conductor walked in and told the two young women that they were about to arrive. As the women collected their things together, Dan remembered that he still had the room key from the Bell Tower Hotel in his backpack. He needed to dispose of it.
Around ten minutes after they had arrived in Lanzhou the train started pulling away again. Dan breathed a sigh of relief; another major city passed and as far as he was aware there were still no police on board. He was alone in his cabin – just the way he liked it. As he peered out of the window the train began to cross a deep gorge. Below them a vast, swirling brown river coursed its way through the outskirts of the city. Dan grabbed the room key and ran to the end of the carriage. He pushed the window down again and threw the key out, watching as it tumbled away until it was out of sight, heading for a watery end in the Yellow River.
Dan was free of the industrial heartland of China and making progress westwards. There were thousands of miles still to cover and the reality that he could be captured at any second was a constant weight on his mind.
In contrast, and unbeknownst to Dan or all but a very small handful of people in China, the Zhou family was approaching Singapore and would touch down within the hour. A discreet convoy of cars was waiting airside to whisk the family away to a villa on the exclusive Nassim Road and into obscurity.
Before long, darkness was falling over Dan’s train. He watched as they passed through remote station after remote station, lit only by dim fluorescent bulbs and largely abandoned, save for the occasional cleaner sweeping sand from the platforms and a few moths fluttering fruitlessly at the station lights. Hunger pains began to set in as Dan hadn’t eaten since breakfast in the Muslim Quarter. He couldn’t stomach another pot of instant noodles even though he suspected it was the only food on board. He lay on his bed and set his alarm for 04:00.
He had no intention of going as far as Dunhuang.
4
Into The Desert
At 04:00 the alarm on his phone went off. It felt brutally early and his cabin was cold. Outside the sky was pitch black, hostile and uninviting. Dan couldn’t make out a single thing in the darkness. The gentle rocking motion of the train and the sound of the tracks beneath were the only confirmation that they were actually moving. Before long the train began to slow and Dan left his cabin. The conductor always stood at the end of the carriage to his right, so Dan turned left and headed down the hallway away from her. As the train pulled into the station, a sign in English floated past the window. “Jia Yu Guan” it read. This was it.
The train ground to a halt and Dan opened the doors on the opposite side of the carriage to the platform. This side of the station was dark and deserted as Dan dropped his backpack down onto the tracks and clambered backwards down the ladder, jumping the last two feet onto the stone ballast between the rails. He quickly closed the door behind him, the latch conspicuously clicking back into place. He momentarily crouched close to the carriage to ensure no-one had heard him. The air was freezing and he could hardly see where he was going as he picked up his bag, skipped quickly across the adjacent tracks and climbed on to the opposing platform. A clock hanging in the empty waiting room read 04:38. There was only a low railing between the platform and the road outside so Dan climbed over it and, leaving the station behind, began walking towards the town he could see ahead of him. Behind him the train began to pull out of the station and he turned to watch it leave, wondering what fallout there would be in Dunhuang when the conductor would knock on his cabin door only to find he wasn’t there.
Dan had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do for the next few hours. He hadn’t even really thought through the next part of his plan. The only thing he knew was that he wanted the authorities to know that he wasn’t in Dunhuang, if they even thought he was heading in that direction.
He needed to rest and he needed to eat, so the priority was to find a cheap hotel where he could catch up on sleep and get breakfast later that morning. The sun was just starting to rise and the sky was turning from black to dark blue. He yawned a deep yawn, inhaling the cold desert air.
As he approached the town he found a hotel on the left-hand side of the road – the Huatian Hotel. It was a large white building with dark floor-to-ceiling windows. As he pushed open the door and walked into the lobby, a woman emerged from a side room, half asleep with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. His arrival had clearly woken her, but she stopped as soon as she saw he was neither someone she knew nor Chinese. Dan kept walking towards the front desk. The woman stood still and started talking to him in Mandarin, puzzled by the early-morning visitor. He gestured that he needed to sleep and for one night only. She continued talking at him, starting to look annoyed by the interruption. He continued gesturing “one night”.
Eventually and with an audible sigh the woman sat down at the front desk. She turned the monitor of the computer on and waited for it to light up. Picking up a pair of reading glasses, she shuffled them around with her cheeks, her contorted face reflective of her mood. Eventually the computer woke up and she turned to Dan, her head cocked to one side in annoyance, and muttered what sounded like numbers. Dan shrugged his shoulders; all he wanted was one bed for the night.
The woman picked up her calculator, pushed numbers into it with her chubby pink fingers and held it up. Three hundred and fifty-six yuan. Dan shrugged his shoulders again and nodded in agreement. Taking out his rapidly depleting wad of cash, he paid for the night. It was early in the day and he assumed he had paid for the following night as well as the rest of this morning, but he wasn’t going to be able to ask. The woman took the room key off a hook on the wall behind her and pointed to the stairs. His room was number 223. She hadn’t asked for his passport. Dan offered an uncertain “xie xie”, which was met with a meagre smile, before he picked up his dusty backpack. The woman turned the monitor off and walked back to her room at the side of the lobby, the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders. Outside, the sky was now a dark blue and only a few delivery lorries roamed the streets. It had just gone quarter past five in the morning as he climbed the stairs of the hotel to his room, opened the door and flicked on the light.
Inside, the room was like every other cheap hotel he had stayed in; small, with cheap tan-coloured wooden furniture. The walls were papered an off-white colour, dirtied by the scuffmarks of the hundreds of suitcases to have collided with them over the years. The small sofa that ran along the wall near the bed was beige and unforgivingly hard. The headboard and lampshades were the same colour as the sofa. On one wall hung a faded A4-size print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a cheap plastic frame. In the corner of the room on a dark wood table stood a large CRT television that was as deep as it was wide. Above it hung an air conditioning unit from out of which ran a large hose that disappeared through a hole in the wall next to the window. The white plastic from the unit had turned yellow with age, and the room smelled of tobacco. There was a large dark ring on the ceiling around the light – the grime of ten thousand cigarettes smoked beneath it. On the bedside table stood a glass ashtray, dirtied by the ten thousand cigarettes stubbed out on it. But at least the room was dark, and it was significantly warmer than frigid desert air outside. Dan was tired from a poor night’s sleep on the train, broken at four o’clock that morning. He kept his clothes on as a climbed under the sheets of the bed and curled into the foetal position to catch a few more hours’ sleep. He turned the light off and was out within seconds.
It was noisy outside the hotel when he woke up several hours later. He could hear traffic in the street beyond the window and the sound of rooms being cleaned further down the corridor. Yawning and aching, Dan craned his neck towards the clock on the bedside table. As he watched, it flashed from 13:14 to 13:15. His body clock was all over the place – a combination of jet lag, exhaustion and the broken night on the train earlier that day. He rolled onto his back and stared at the smoke-stained ceiling. His stomach was painfully empty and he needed to eat. He lay there half considering his situation, half slipping back into sleep. His head was heavy with anxiety as he was yet to work out where he was going to go from here. It all seemed too much to think about in that moment and his stomach was talking louder than his head.
