“The morning you people arrive here, while you’re still standing on the train steps, and before your foot has even touched our soil, you’re already throwing yourselves, as if headfirst from a diving board, into the pool of our knowledge, yearning to swim it lengthwise at top speed, as if the other side held some magical prize known only to yourselves. You cram your alien and ill-matched mindset into the new forms of European thought with as much passion as your women squeeze their mangled feet into the tight holes of their shoes. My impression is that if you found out one day that people with longer legs saw things more clearly, you would not hesitate to cut off your own legs and replace them with longer prostheses.
“You are our fastest-learning, our cleverest students, and at the same time our most ungrateful. Armed with the seven-league boots of our knowledge, you leave them on your doorsteps like a pair of slippers, only to walk barefoot on the stone floor of your traditions, carpeted with your superstitions.
“You were one of my best and most inspired students. But of course, this alone is hardly cause to renew our acquaintance after so many years, in such totally different circumstances.
“When you vanished from my sight like so many of your people before you, I thought our paths would never cross again. I forgot about you, as one forgets a pedestrian one collides with on the street, who vanishes with a polite tip of the hat. Unfortunately, things went differently. Our paths crossed once more, and now nothing could untangle them, unless… unless by a radical incision…”
P’an Tsiang-kuei stared at the old man with growing astonishment.
“Excuse me,” he said mildly, “but it seems as though you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Even if I did once study bacteriology and biochemistry with you at the Sorbonne – as indeed, I once did, I believe – I can tell you with total confidence that I have never seen you since.”
“You needn’t tell me,” replied the gray man, peering over the rims of his glasses. “I’m well aware of it. You have in fact never come across me since. It is I who came across you. I met you in Nanjing in 1927. If you recall, that year there were mass outbreaks of Asian cholera reported in a few Chinese provinces. The Bacteriological Association delegated me to go there to undertake some scientific research. I was all the more willing to go there as it meant seeing my only child, who at the time had volunteered for a unit of assault troops; his battleship was stationed off the coast of China.
“The civil war that consumed the areas I was researching forced me to seek asylum in Nanjing. And I indeed had the opportunity to see my son, as his ship was moored at the port entrance. Riots broke out, however, a few days after my arrival. That was when I spotted you for the second time. I saw you at the head of a frenzied mob that attacked the landing troops defending the trading post. You hardly resembled the shy and industrious Sorbonne student I once knew, but still I recognized you at once.
“The English trading post where I found sanctuary was being looted by retreating Chinese soldiers, and so we were woken up, and hastily evacuated in our underwear to the English cruiser waiting in the harbor, under army escort. Among the officers in one of those units was my son. From on deck I observed the ensuing battle through a telescope with tense anticipation. I saw how the savage mob charged out of every crevice of the Chinese city, pouring over the entire shoreline. Spearheading the crowd was you. Pressed by the barbarous rabble, our soldiers began to retreat. Then I spotted my boy. He was running with a revolver in his hand, stopping those who were escaping and forcing them to turn back. The rabid throng fell upon him. And then I saw, with my own two eyes, how you leapt upon him first and smashed in his skull with the butt of your rifle.
“I lost consciousness and was taken to a cabin.
“Since then I’ve been entirely alone. You took everything from me in one fell swoop. Science, which had always been the very air I breathed, became a loathsome business. Whenever I tried to sit down to work, the image of my boy always hovered before my eyes, and I was incapable of writing a single letter…
“Taking into consideration my service to the field of science, I was given retirement as an infirm old man, and reluctantly granted a professorial pension. Now I am vermin, of no use to anyone, gnawing at the carrion of my own many years of work.
“Through those years, sitting alone in a dark room like a mole, I often thought of you. Long into the nights I spent searching for the footbridge that would lead from that industrious Sorbonne student, burning with holy admiration and an almost fiery love for our centuries-old culture and knowledge, placing the stiff flowers of his zeal upon that altar, to the savage Asiatic, massacring his recent teachers and welcoming hosts in the wild dementia of his hatred. Roaming the streets in the evenings and spying on the slit-eyed students leaving the Sorbonne with their schoolbooks under their arms, I tried to decipher the secret of their hatred from their faces. But their faces were smiling, and as taut as masks.
“One evening I went to see a friend, the rector of the Sorbonne, and over the course of a long conversation I tried to convince him that European culture grafted onto Asian soil, like a bacteria transplanted into a new environment, would be murderous for Europe, that in recklessly enlightening Asia, Europe was setting the stage for its own annihilation. I showed him that not a day was to be wasted, that all the European universities should shut their doors to the Asians. He took me for a madman, and steering the conversation down another path he gently guided me home.
“Over time, all concrete images of you were eroded from my memory and, sitting for hours with my eyes squeezed shut, I tried in vain to summon them back. Your face had slipped out somewhere through my memory’s filter, there remained only your slanting, narrowed eyes and jutting cheekbones, like a stencil whose gaps I’d have to fill in myself.
“Until one evening, I came face to face with you on the street. I recognized you at once. You were walking quickly, and didn’t even notice that I stopped in your path, as though rooted to the spot.
“I spent the whole night mulling over various schemes for revenge, which came to me on their own. At dawn, unable to wait for the day, I headed straight for the police and ordered them to arrest you. They hemmed and hawed. They indicated the lack of evidence and promised to conduct an investigation. I realized that taking you to trial would be futile, because many people considered me a madman.
“At that point I understood that I had only one recourse: I had to kill you. On my way home I purchased a six-shooter and went in search of you.
“I started to frequent Chinese restaurants, estimating that the greatest chance of meeting you was there. My expectations did not fail me. Two weeks ago I did indeed finally come across you in this very restaurant. That evening I found out, however, that it is less easy to kill a man than you might expect. Clearly a certain inborn predisposition is required, or at the very least some training. I have neither.
“For the past two weeks I have been tracing your footsteps, I have been waiting for you in the evening outside your hotel, I have been eating dinner with you in this very diner, I have been by you like a shadow. And I do not know how to kill you.
“Others do it off the cuff, on a whim. Maybe you’ve got to avoid thinking about it and then it comes by itself, instinctively. But I can’t stop thinking about it. As I walk you home, I swear to myself that tomorrow I’ll do it for certain. But ‘tomorrow’ always ends just like ‘today.’