|
After the official ceremony was over I gave Fred the name of my contact in Venice and alerted him that the fondi were about to crack wide open.
"That's not significant," Fred replied.
"It is. It could be. We need to follow this up," I said to him.
"And give our location away," Fred replied. "I can't let you do that."
On Fred's suggestion I gave the information to Fred's Chinese counterpart the next morning. He smiled at the gesture and told us that he had wanted to explore that kind of link himself, for a long time. He assured us that this contact would be explored through "discrete" channels.
I had the feeling that it might have been Steve who had suggested to Fred that we should all spend the critical first few weeks in hiding. As soon as Fred had mentioned that plan, Steve had come to mind. It turned out that Fred's Chinese counterpart had suggested this. He had chosen a small town for us to hide in, called Yongshan, located far in the interior, "a tiny place somewhere to the West of Yibin on the Jinshajiang River," as he described its location. He also suggested that we should travel there by train. He told us that travelling by train in China leaves no traces behind in any official records that the FBI might use to track us down. He suggested that they would surely track us down if we stayed in Hong Kong, but if we left, with Hong Kong being the gateway to all of Asia, our trail would go cold for them, and that would be it.
In essence, that's what the man told us. He seemed to be genuinely concerned. He even supplied the train tickets that were evidently paid for by the Chinese government as a kind of professional curtsey to Fred, so it seemed. Fred's Chinese counterpart also regarded our situation as being rather amusing. He even laughed at one point, when he pointed out how ironic our situation was. There we were, a bunch of Americans, the champions of human rights and freedom, fleeing our own country, the land of the free, under the threat of political persecution, and were now seeking refuge in the very same country that America had long denounced and slandered for alleged politically motivated human rights abuses. He said, that if the situation weren't so sad and serious he would be tempted to make fun of it the next time a high nosed American delegation came to visit.
Stepping off the train in Yongshan, two days later, was like stepping into a new and ancient world all at the same time. It was a New World for us, and some of it was actually modern, though we also found it an ancient world in historic terms. We were walking on stairs, bridges, and walkways with worn out paving stones that had withstood the grinding of a thousand years, so it seemed.
"What happened to our beautiful dreaming on that night in the dessert in New Mexico, a few days ago?" I asked Sylvia on our second evening there.
"Our dreaming is becoming fulfilled," Sylvia answered with a bright smile on her face. "This is life! We wanted to become involved in all its dimensions, didn't we? Now we are involved to the full. The grand adventure has begun. Today, the music of our life will be Chinese, which we hadn't even dreamed of. Tomorrow it may be something else."
Indeed, our New World was pervaded with Chinese music, new and old, in eating-places; on the Market Square; in Chinese opera; even in our hotel.
Actually, we spent more time exploring our new surroundings than we spent in dialog about the reason for our being there. We all knew why we were there; at least we thought we knew the reason. The past was the past. What was done was done. But none of us knew what our future would be like. Would we be safe in China? Would China be receptive to our advanced ideas? Or would the Chinese people cling tenaciously to the past and remain blinded by ancient axioms that appeared as distant from the truth as this place was from the sea?
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
|
