Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

The police didn’t let my mother into the room. All they did was pass on the two apples she’d brought for me.

I thought of Liu Ping — the daughter of the Guangxi farm’s education officer whom my father had talked about so fondly. I imagined her in a white skirt, playing her violin like an angel. The image gave me strength. Then I remembered the time my mother and I went to visit my father in the camp in Shandong. We travelled there by long-distance bus. I slept curled up on my seat, my head resting on the canvas bag on my mother’s lap. Inside the bag were gifts she’d brought for my father: a blanket, a jar of pig fat and a woollen hat.

The officer kicked a leg of the table, stirring me from my doze.

‘Wake up! This isn’t a dormitory. I’ve had to stay here all bloody night for you. How many pages have you finished?’

I handed him my seven pages of densely written notes.

He glanced through them. ‘There’s still a lot of information that you’re holding back.’ He checked his watch, lit a cigarette. I breathed in the smoke. It made me feel a little less alone. ‘I’ll give you one last chance. You have until dawn. If you haven’t written everything down by then, we will show you no mercy.’

I searched through my mind again, and dredged up every bad thing I’d done.

I’d once carved a pistol out of a piece of wood and painted it black. It looked very convincing. I’d attached it to my belt, like Li Xiangyang, the heroic leader of the guerrilla force that fought against the Japanese. My mother had told me that people used fake guns to commit robberies, and that it was against the law to own one. I gave details of the time and place of the crime, but there were no victims to report.

I’d killed a chicken with a slingshot, then run away. The victim was a female chicken.

I’d also smashed a window. I’d thrown the stone in an attempt to hit a cat. The only victim of this incident was the windowpane.

Dawn broke at last. I knew this, not because the room became any lighter, but because I could hear buses driving past on the road outside. I caught a whiff of disinfectant. It reminded me of the public latrines across the road from our compound. I hardly ever used them, because we had a toilet in our flat. But my mother often went there. We had to pay for our water now, which we didn’t in the old dormitory block, so my mother preferred to run down six flights of stairs and use the latrines rather than waste money flushing our own toilet. At night, the latrines were the only place in the area where there was a light still shining. After I’d learned how to smoke, I often hung out there in the evening with my friends. When men went in to have a shit, they’d always light a fag and toss the stub onto the floor before they left. We’d quickly pick up the stubs and carry on smoking them. Sometimes we’d snatch the fags from the men’s mouths while they were still pulling up their trousers. The worst they’d ever do would be to call us filthy brats.

One night, one of our gang ran over to me and said, ‘Dai Wei, some of Duoduo’s shit has splashed onto your footrest.’ We’d each assigned ourselves our own hole, and if anyone splashed their shit onto the ceramic footrests of an adjacent hole, they’d get beaten up.

We chased after Duoduo and dragged him back into the latrines. He tried to break free, kicking the wall so hard that chunks of plaster fell off. But there were four of us holding him down, and we had him firmly in our grip. I pulled down his trousers and slapped his arse, and he got an erection. Everyone shouted, ‘Let’s see how big it can get!’ I grabbed hold of his penis and rubbed it hard.

‘Let go! Fuck off! Let go of me!’ His contorted face went bright red. He squatted down, trying to pull his penis free. Tears poured from his eyes. At last he ejaculated. I relaxed my grip and wiped my hands on the wall. We laughed as we pushed him out onto the street. He ran away, holding up his trousers, his silhouette growing smaller and smaller.

Three people had hung themselves in those latrines. One of them was an old woman who’d travelled up from the countryside. When she arrived in Beijing, she visited our local police station and made enquiries about a Mr Qian who’d been imprisoned by the Communists in the 1940s. The police informed her that this Mr Qian had been executed shortly after Liberation. They later discovered that the woman was Mr Qian’s wife, and had been incarcerated since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. When she was released from jail, the village head had refused to allocate her any land, so she came to Beijing to look for her husband. After she heard the news of his death, she hung herself in the women’s latrines…

I’d already refilled the fountain pen three times from the ink pot on the policeman’s desk. I felt as heavy as a sack of concrete. My legs were shaking with exhaustion.

A few hours later, my mother came to take me home.

As soon as we walked through the gates of our compound, I heard Duoduo shout, ‘You’re a big shot now, young man! Spent the night at a police station! That’s quite something!’

‘Bugger off!’ my mother yelled.

In that instant, all the fear I’d felt in the police station melted away. Although my swollen testicles had rubbed my inner thighs raw, I was still able to stand upright. Had the police turned up to arrest me again, I would have sauntered back to the station with them, whistling as I went.

When we stepped inside our flat my mother slapped me hard on both cheeks. ‘You shameful little hooligan! How can I hold my head up now?’ She pointed to my father’s ashes in the box under her bed, and shouted at them, ‘This is all your fault, Dai Changjie! I had to bear the burden of your crimes for twenty years, and now I’m burdened with those of your son!’ I cried when I saw my mother sob, and when my brother saw me crying, he burst into tears too.

I promised my mother that I’d never read another banned novel, and begged her to let me go to sleep. She wiped her tears. I collapsed onto her bed and dozed off, my legs twitching with tiredness.

When I woke again it was already dark outside. My mother had removed my trousers and applied red ointment to the purple whip marks on my legs.

She told me that I’d slept for thirty-six hours. ‘They let you off lightly. If they’d had any sense they would have wiped out the Dai line! Nothing good will ever come of the sons of a rightist!’ She pulled a tray over. ‘Here’s some cake and milk for you.’ Then she grumbled, ‘I brought you into this world. I should be the one to decide how you get punished. They had no right to beat you up like that.’

The cake I was chewing dissolved quickly in my bitter saliva.

‘Mum, I swear on Chairman Mao’s life that I’ll study hard from now on. So they didn’t label me a “wrong-footed youth” then?’

‘I don’t think so, but you’re on their records now. And because of you, your friend Lulu was taken in for questioning as well.’

My limbs went limp. I had betrayed her. I shouldn’t have given her that copy of A Young Girl’s Heart , or given her name to the police, or told them that I’d touched her. I felt sick with regret.

‘You’ve grown up too fast,’ my mother said, her expression hardening. ‘Those decadent traits should have been knocked out of you long ago. Your father was poisoned by Western ideas. It’s his fault you’ve turned out this way. There are so many bad people around today, corrupting society with their bourgeois lifestyles. They talk about sexual liberation, sexual freedom — their only aim is to poison the minds of our youth, allowing imperialist countries to change China through peaceful evolution. If you don’t step up your political studies, you’ll end up on the wrong path. That boy who gave you the pornographic book has been taken in too. I suppose you did a good deed, exposing his evil crime to the police. That must be why they treated you so leniently.’