Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘I doubt he’s making as much as that,’ Auntie Hao says. ‘Videos are old hat. Everyone’s switched to VCDs. The machines only cost four hundred yuan, and you can buy pirated VCDs for just five yuan, so who would want to pay three yuan to watch a film in his grubby video room? Anyway, he won’t be there much longer. That area is going to be demolished soon. They’re going to build a big commercial residential estate there.’

‘When do you think our compound will be demolished?’

‘I doubt they’ll pull this place down. Some of the blocks in this compound were built in the eighties, but most are 1950s Soviet-style buildings. They’re very sturdy. They could last another hundred years.’

‘I haven’t been to the cinema for ages. I don’t even watch television much. They always repeat the same programmes.’

‘Haven’t you been watching that new series, The Incorruptible Director General ? It’s great. No one has dared make a drama about high-level corruption before. Even the provincial governor is shown to be a crook.’

‘The governor was criticising his son for corrupt practices, he wasn’t guilty of corruption himself.’

‘Well, you must have missed the last episode, then. It revealed that the governor was involved in the fraud too. The police took him away in handcuffs.’

‘That drama series Black Screen last year had a corrupt city mayor.’

‘We’re surrounded by corruption these days. All the new casinos and nightclubs that are springing up everywhere are financed by the expense accounts of corrupt officials. They’re packed with high-ranking cadres, blowing away public money on expensive food and drink.’

They stop talking for a while and crack melon seeds between their teeth.

When we demonstrated against official profiteering in 1989, only a few cases of corruption had come to light. But now the problem seems to have become endemic.

My mind turns to Wen Niao again. Two weeks after she made love to me, she stopped visiting. During Spring Festival she telephoned my mother to wish us a happy Chinese New Year and said she couldn’t make the next appointment because she was going sales shopping at Guiyou Department Store. Perhaps she’s already moved into the staff apartment building her institute has built beyond the third ring road. She’s been allocated an eighty-square-metre flat. She said it’s close to the ring road, so it’s very noisy, but she can see the White Dagoba Temple from the windows, so she believes it’s her karmic destiny to live there.

On her last visit, she said to me, ‘I was on a train one night. The other passengers around me were sprawled over the wooden seats fast asleep. I got up and walked to the end of the carriage. When I looked out of the back window and saw the moon floating above the black horizon a terrible sadness came over me. I finally accepted that I’d been reborn as a woman and the lamas would never come to fetch me… When I was fifteen, I went to Tibet and visited all the monasteries, but never found the one my previous incarnation died in.’

She’s about the same age as me, so her previous incarnation would have died in the late sixties. He couldn’t have died in a monastery. By that time, all the religious buildings in Tibet had been destroyed by the Chinese army, and any incarnate lama would have been languishing in jail or toiling in the fields.

She wiped my face with mineral water and said, ‘Then I visited the Forbidden City a few years ago, and I knew I’d once lived there too. I saw the comb I used, the pillow I rested my head on. I tell you, everything looked so familiar to me. I leaned against a pillar and cried my heart out. I didn’t want to leave the palace compound. When they closed at five o’clock, the stewards had to drag me out. I did a little research, and realised that I was Empress Wencheng in a past life. She died in Tibet, which explains why I was later reincarnated as a Tibetan lama… The spirits of my past lives often visit me, and tell me I must achieve something great. But what can a frail woman like me hope to achieve? My policeman boyfriend was a Buddhist. When I first met him, I knew at once he’d worn the dragon robes of an emperor in his previous life. I realised my role in this incarnation was to make sure he became President of China. I thought that with the power of all my past lives to propel him forward, he was bound to succeed. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a playboy. I had to break up with him. He went to nightclubs and saunas almost every night…’

She wrapped her fingers in muslin, then rubbed each of my teeth individually and wiped my tongue clean. It felt wonderful. When my mother scrubs my teeth with cotton earbuds she always makes my gums bleed.

I wish Wen Niao would walk through the door again and bring me some sunlight and fresh air. But I doubt she’d want to repeat what some people might consider a perverse sexual act. She probably thinks her behaviour that afternoon was caused by a temporary lapse of sanity.

She once said to me, ‘Everyone out there is sick in the head. Who knows, perhaps you’re the only sane person left in this city.’

It’s been thirty days since her last visit. My mother tried to reach her on her pager last week but she never replied.

I can hear my mother grumbling, ‘What did we do to upset Nurse Wen? Why doesn’t she come round any more? Was it because I asked her to empty the urine bottle last time she was here? But she’s a trained nurse. She’s had to do many worse things than that.’

When the telephone rings, she rushes to the sitting room. A few days ago, a buyer was found for my kidney. A provisional price of eight thousand yuan has been agreed, with the middleman taking a thousand-yuan cut.

‘All right… You can come and do the blood test tomorrow. When will he hand over the cash? I was wondering if he might be able to give me a bit more…’

The voice on the other end says, ‘The transplant won’t be happening for at least two months. The middleman must make sure your son is compatible with the patient before he can confirm a date. And as for the price, I think you’ve already got a very good deal. If you’d sold just before Spring Festival you probably wouldn’t have got more than two thousand yuan. That’s when most of the prisoners are executed, so there’s always a glut of available organs…’

‘I’ll need to warn the police station that I’ll be away for a while, or they’ll presume I’ve gone on the run.’

‘I’ll get the middleman to have a word with them. They have strong connections with the police. That’s how they manage to get hold of the lists of prisoners on death row.’

My mother has told me she can’t do anything more for me, and that my body will have to fend for itself from now on. I hope that I die during the operation. How wonderful that would be.

Although I know Wen Niao will never return, I’m still wallowing in the blissful memories of her visits. Every word she said soothed my nerves. When she leaned over me and I smelt on her shirt collar the scent of grilled chicken livers from the street stall she’d passed on her way to the flat, I almost fainted with pleasure.

She won’t come back. She’s sitting in a room somewhere in this big city, unaware that my body yearns for her to make love to me again so that I can die in one last burst of ecstasy.

Blood gushes through your body like water from a hot spring. The seeds that Wen Niao buried in your flesh begin to germinate.

A Bangladeshi boy is singing ‘Beautiful Lake Tai’ in a televised song competition for foreign students. Just as the final round is about to begin, An Qi arrives with her invalid husband. He’s been here once before. He’s able to walk up to the third floor with the aid of crutches. The cigarettes he smokes smell of hospital wards.