The Amur River by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron [Thubron, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

*

Gleb is as good as his word. Through some Heihe business contact he has arranged for an unemployed Chinese man to accompany me, if I like him, for the first few hundred miles along the Amur-Heilongjiang. That way, he’d said, I wouldn’t be duped or assaulted. I will pay the man the little he asks.

In my Heihe hotel, a rowdy pile in the town centre, I wait to meet Liang. I fear a verbose guide or even an intelligence agent. But when he arrives in the reception hall, dressed in faded jeans and a worn jerkin, he looks out of place. Beneath his flat cap I see an owlish face that returns my smile with a kind of melancholy calm. We are both embarrassed, unsure who is interviewing whom. He finds my journey strange, of course. Beyond Aihui, old Aigun, twenty miles away, he says, the river is unknown to him. His people came from Jilin province, far south of Heilongjiang, in the big migrations of the 1960s. They were a family of ten. He pulls off his cap from a balding head. Only a thinning dust descends from a forehead which a lone furrow crosses like a knife scar. He had worked in Heihe as a printer, then as a carpenter, and had even tried a stint as a city guide, but there was no longer money in that. Perhaps it was from those days that his talk fills with an outlandish Russian, while I reply in faulty Chinese. We must sound terrible. He has only been once in Russia, he says, on a group holiday to Novosibirsk with his wife. ‘We were all mugged. A gang of Mafia. But we fought back.’ He smiles in the hardy Chinese way, on an assembly of dented teeth. I instinctively like him, and I sense he is relieved by my appearance: a little down-at-heel, like him. We agree to start in two days’ time.

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