“I’ve found myself in this position for the first time in my life. I’ve never tried to kill anyone. That’s just how it’s turned out. I’ve never even been to war. Reading the descriptions of dozens of murders in the newspapers, I didn’t imagine that it could be so difficult. In the morning, having seen you to your hotel (I’ve adjusted to the hours you keep), I return home, pull some old newspapers out of the corner and carefully read descriptions of various sorts of killings. I reasoned that certain preparations are necessary for everything, even if on an elementary level. In this case, however, studies aren’t much good. Much as a knowledge of the history of painting in no way teaches you how to paint, a knowledge of the history of every murder since the creation of the world cannot teach you how to kill a single man with your own two hands.
“After two weeks, I had practically lost all hope that I would ever manage to kill you.
“The outbreak of the plague cheered me at first – it was such a simple and unexpected way out of the situation. I counted on it coming to my rescue, that upon arriving at your hotel the following evening with my daily intention of killing you, this time for certain – I’d come across a stretcher bearing your corpse. I’ve come every evening, right on time for the arrival of the dead-carts.
“Yet the plague has spared you. At first I enjoyed shadowing you, I observed you wandering aimlessly through the empty nighttime streets like a rat caught in a trap. The certainty that sooner or later you would have to die from the plague was the only consolation when I returned home unsuccessful. But time is passing. I myself could die, if not today, then tomorrow. It could easily happen that I die before you. It could also happen that I die and you altogether survive. This I cannot allow to happen. Today I swore to myself that I would kill you, without fail. I came here early on purpose to occupy the table behind the one where you normally sit. I deduced that killing you from behind would be easiest. But today you came late and sat down right at my table for the first time. I feel that once again, I will not be able to kill you.
“I’ve decided to use the last means at my disposal. I feel that I shall never be able to kill you as long as I know that you are unsuspecting. When I’m convinced that you know the danger at hand and have your guard up, then I believe things will go more smoothly. This is why I have decided to get everything out into the open. Get ready! Defend yourself! Today I’m going to kill you as you leave this building!”
The professor fell silent, clearly agitated, his gray eyes staring over the rims of his glasses and not straying a moment from P’an Tsiang-kuei. P’an Tsiang-kuei observed him for a moment with curiosity.
“Shall we leave at once?” he asked calmly, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
“As you wish,” the professor courteously replied.
P’an Tsiang-kuei silently settled the bill and got up from the table. He made way for the professor to go through the door. For a brief moment they stood on ceremony, both hesitating to be the first to go out. Eventually the professor went first.
Finding themselves on the street, they walked side by side in silence. After five minutes, the street they were walking down suddenly came to an end, hitting the stone balustrade of the shoreline like a head colliding with a wall. Down below, the Seine glittered with specks of light.
P’an Tsiang-kuei and the professor stood there, not knowing what to do.
“Tell me,” the professor finally said, wiping the misted lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief, “tell me if you’d be so kind… I simply don’t understand. Why is it exactly that you despise us so implacably when you owe us so much, when you are endlessly taking from us. I think about this constantly, and I can’t find an answer. If I killed you, I’d never know. Please explain why, if it makes no difference to you…”
Under the arcades of the bridge with their feminine curves, black, sparkling water babbled with a million mouths in prayer.
Leaning on the stone balustrade, P’an Tsiang-kuei spoke in a measured and passionless voice:
“Asian-European antagonism, a subject on which your scholars have scribbled whole volumes, searching for its origins in the depths of racial and religious differences, plays itself out entirely on the surface of everyday economics and class struggle. Your science, of which you are so proud and which we travel here to study, is not a system of tools to help man conquer nature, but rather to help Europe conquer non-Europe, to exploit weaker continents. This is why we despise your Europe and why we come here to study you so fervently. Only by mastering the achievements of your science will we be able to shed the yoke of your oppression. Your bourgeois Europe, expatiating far and wide on your cultural self-sufficiency, is no more than a small parasite latched onto the western flank of Asia’s gigantic body, sucking its juices dry. It is we, planting our rice and growing cotton and tea, who are – along with your own proletariat – the real, though indirect, creators of your culture. Its complex aroma, spreading the sweat of your workers and peasants all around the world, mingles with the smell of the Chinese coolie’s sweat.
“But today the tides are turning. Your gluttonous Europe is croaking like a mare who has broken its leg before the final hurdle. It’s croaking without having swallowed everything down, its gullet clogged from the greedy mouthfuls it’s taken. It’s no accident that it’s being killed off by the plague, an old friend of ours in Asia. The stomach of European capitalism has found Asia indigestible.
“How sweet it is to watch the death of your enemy, sneaking up behind him, to see miniature reflections of your face in his terror-dilated pupils. I saw one of your plague victims. He was practically blue when the health service carried him out of his house. When they wanted to put him into a vehicle with other people, he burst out screaming: ‘You’re not putting me in there! Those people are infested!’ They had to use force. He thrashed, kicked and bit, and when he was finally pushed inside and the doors were bolted behind him, he suddenly turned blue and stiff. His fear of death advanced death’s slow progress.
“I looked into those eyes wide with lethal horror, and then I understood that precisely this fear was the engine and the mainspring of your whole vast culture. That dread, that drive to endure at any cost, against the logical inevitability of death, has pushed you to superhuman effort, to carve your faces into such summits as could not be wiped clean by the all-consuming river of time. I also thought that perhaps only with an injection of the serum of European culture could our Asia be torn from its thousand-year coma under the Bodhi Tree of Buddhism. Thus far Europe has only sent us her merchants and her missionaries. Christianity was once a venom Asia inoculated into Europe, a venom that destroyed the rich Roman culture and plunged Europe for many centuries into a barbarian darkness. But Europe proved capable of assimilating even this poison of powerlessness, kineticizing it, sucking out the venom and turning it into a tool of oppression. Today Europe is getting its belated revenge by exporting it back to Asia. Unable to colonize us outright, they want to turn us into a colony of the Vatican. Christ is a salesman, a paid stooge of the profiteers.
“Today, however, it can no longer do us any harm. Europe is dying in its last convulsive spasms. No cordon sanitaire will save it. The plague will surge unstoppably across the whole of the continent when it’s done with Paris. To tell the truth, its meddling in our age-old conflict is entirely superfluous. The absurdity of this intervention would almost convince me of the existence of your god, whose tricks – if we are to believe the authors of the Holy Book – were never exactly distinguished by their excessive intelligence. The years were already numbered for your imperialist Europe one way or another, and there was no need to hurry the conclusion with such extravagance.