Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘A soldier addressed the Square this morning,’ Lin Lu said. ‘He kept jabbering on about cutting up enemy forces and penetrating the adversary’s camps. I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Go and listen to what this lot are saying, Dai Wei. See if you can understand what they’re going on about.’ Lin Lu then asked Tang Guoxian to take him to the major entry points into the city to check the state of the barricades.

To the north of the Eastern Wastes lies the Land of the Nobles. The inhabitants have jade swords attached to their waists, and feed on wild beasts. Two tigers accompany them wherever they go.

The cold wind blowing outside the ambulance car I’m lying in makes me long for the streets of southern China — the smell of mosquito-repellent incense wafting from street stalls, the fluorescent light falling on plastic buckets and brooms hanging from windows and doors. Sometimes I’d sit on a kerb, drinking a bottle of Coke and slapping the mosquitoes that landed on my legs. When windows began to light up in the early evening but the sky was still bright enough to see the leaves of the distant trees, I’d close my textbook and think about where I was going to take A-Mei that night…

Fragments of various conversations I had with A-Mei float around my parietal lobes, but the locations in which they took place have become muddled. ‘You go to the play, if you want,’ she said. ‘I don’t like that actress.’ I remember that we were sitting in a restaurant at the time. There was a window behind her. Through it I could see pedestrians and buses and the large branches of a banyan tree that was trapped between two buildings. But now I hear her saying these same words to me during a telephone conversation, so the memory of the restaurant must have been fabricated. My memories are like old tapes that have been recorded over in so many places that the original track has become incomprehensible.

My clearest memory of A-Mei is of her saying, ‘What is it you love about me?’ She was sitting naked on our bed when she said this, her brown nipples tilting to either side. But that question is all I remember of the conversation. Everything that came before and after it is a void.

‘We agreed that if I gave you eighteen yuan, you’d take us right up to the emergency room!’ my mother whines, sounding both congested and anxious. ‘You can’t just dump him at the hospital gates like this!’

I have a temperature of forty-two degrees. Apparently, my lips have turned blue. But I don’t feel I’m about to pass out. In fact, my thoughts seem unusually clear at the moment.

‘This is a professional ambulance car, Auntie! We should have charged you ten yuan just to carry him downstairs — especially since you live on the third floor — but we only charged you eight. And now you’re trying to beat the price down even more. How do you expect us to make a living?’

‘The Xicheng ambulance cars charge twenty yuan, but the drivers carry the patients to the car, then carry them all the way to the waiting room when they reach the hospital.’ My mother had gone to a public telephone box and called many different ambulance companies before she chose this one.

‘Rubbish. There are only two ambulance companies in Beijing, and we’re the best. The drivers have medical training, and our cars are fitted with first-aid equipment.’

‘Please, doctor comrades!’ my mother cries. ‘At least help me carry him to the hospital’s entrance. It’s only fifty metres away. I’ll give you an extra two yuan. It’s so cold outside. If you leave him on the street, how will I be able to drag him over there all on my own?’

‘… You don’t love me,’ A-Mei murmured as she sat on her bed. ‘You just have a longing to return to the womb. Like those fish that go back to their natal streams to spawn and die…’ The bedside lamp cast a yellow glow over her bare stomach.

Feeling a sudden urge to have a smoke on the balcony, I sat up, reached for my pack of cigarettes and said, ‘Yes, your body’s a fleshy tomb. You want to lure me inside and keep me trapped there for the rest of my life.’

She stared at me with wide-open eyes, startled by my outburst, and remained silent for a long time, hugging a pillow to her chest.

The love you felt for her has spread through your cerebellum and seeped into the medulla oblongata at the base of your brain stem.

More than twenty hours had passed since the government had declared martial law.

Like deer gathering at a lakeside to drink, the students gathered at the Monument, unaware that the Square was a hunting ground and the Monument was the snare.

‘If the soldiers are armed with real guns and real bullets, the government must have given them orders to suppress us,’ Fan Yuan said to Bai Ling, who stared back at him blankly.

Everyone on the upper terrace was seized with a strange and horrible fear. We glanced about nervously, listening, waiting, harbouring suspicions about each other.

‘The martial law troops have been sent to protect the capital and restore order,’ Tian Yi said, too softly for anyone to hear. ‘They won’t attack us.’ The night before, she’d gone to the emergency tent suffering from exhaustion, and had fallen asleep on the ground. The doctors assumed she’d passed out and sent her to Fuxing Hospital. But she’d returned to the Square in the morning.

‘Premier Li Peng drew up plans to crush this movement on the first day of the hunger strike,’ said Sister Gao, her face etched with anxiety.

‘Of course he did,’ said Old Fu. ‘This Square isn’t Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, where you can get up and say what you like. It’s the symbolic heart of the Communist state.’ A large ring of keys hung from his belt. We were standing in the shade of the the Hunger Strike Headquarters’ finance office which he headed. He’d bought a safe and got a marshal to sit on it twenty-four hours a day.

‘There are a million people down there,’ Lin Lu said with a deadpan expression. ‘It’s like being surrounded by a human Great Wall.’ Han Dan was standing next him, his face filled with confusion. The two bodyguards flanking him were members of the university football team. One of them was wearing trainers that were at least size 43.

‘This is the Deng Xiaoping era,’ said Zhou Suo, the rugged Qinghua University leader. ‘The government wouldn’t dare use violence against the students.’ He was wearing a grey tracksuit and had a knapsack slung over his shoulder. He gazed out at the Square with the same look of stubborn determination as a Shanxi peasant gazing at the dry hills of the Yellow Plateau.

‘We were in Deng Xiaoping’s era two years ago when Old Fu and I were arrested over there,’ I said, pointing to the north side of the Square. I saw a BEIJING BUDDHIST SOCIETY banner flying there. Monks in yellow robes sat in a long row in front of it, holding up placards demanding religious freedom. In the packed crowds, they looked like a line of yellow stitching running across a patterned tablecloth.

‘But the citizens can’t keep manning the blockades day and night. They’ve got jobs to go to.’ Wu Bin pulled a cigarette from the pocket of his blue shirt, placed it between his lips and struck a match.

Tian Yi was crouching down, sorting through her brown leather bag. When she opened the front zip, a red ballpoint pen fell out and rolled across the terrace’s pale paving stones.

‘All right, let’s just stay here until they come and arrest us!’ said Sister Gao, losing her temper. The red sleeveless top she was wearing had been washed so many times it was covered in tiny balls of fluff.

‘We should set up a military affairs office,’ Wang Fei said. He’d just pushed away a boy who’d jumped onto the upper terrace hoping to take photographs. Students were constantly climbing onto the terraces, but the marshals were usually able to push them back down before they had a chance to reach us.