Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘I told them to get some rest and come back in the morning.’ Wang Fei was wearing nylon shorts. His skinny legs looked very pale.

A few hours before, Yu Jin and I had escorted Bai Ling to this secret tent so that she could get some sleep. Chen Di and Dong Rong were in the science students’ tent behind it, so I thought it would be safe. Yu Jin bought some beer and dried tofu. He and I downed a couple of bottles then fell asleep. No one outside our group knew that Bai Ling was in the tent. I wondered how the mob had tracked her down.

‘Did you see their faces?’ Dong Rong asked. He never took his designer sunglasses off, even at night. During the day, he spent most of his time showing his girlfriend the sights of Beijing. She came from a small town in Zhejiang, and wore tight clothes and heavy make-up.

‘One of them was about thirty,’ Wang Fei said, taking out a cigarette. ‘He looked like a factory worker.’

‘Someone’s cut the cables of our loudspeakers on the Monument,’ Chen Di said, flashing his torch about nervously. The bright beam illuminated his scuffed white trainers.

‘We must hold a press conference,’ Wang Fei said, lighting his cigarette then taking a puff. A voice came over his walkie-talkie: ‘Zhuzi, Zhuzi. If you can hear me, pick up… We have an emergency situation. There are thirty empty army trucks parked on the street and the local residents want to set fire to them…’

‘There’s no need for a press conference,’ Bai Ling said, passing a comb through her short hair. ‘Let’s just keep this episode to ourselves.’

‘They must have heard your walkie-talkie going off, Wang Fei!’ I said. ‘That’s how they found you.’

Yu Jin strutted into the tent like a proud little rooster, his open shirt flapping at his sides like wings. ‘Many of the leaders seem to have scarpered,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen Han Dan, Yang Tao or Pu Wenhua since last night. Or Zhou Suo and Fan Yuan, for that matter. We need to get everyone back here. I’ve just circled Beijing on my bike. There’s a huge banner outside Jianguo Hotel that says “Oppose bourgeois liberalism, support the great Chinese Communist Party!” It doesn’t bode well…’

No one had made any broadcasts that night. It felt as though our movement was fizzling out.

A voice shouted through Wang Fei’s walkie-talkie again. ‘There’s a crowd of about a hundred guys here. They’re dressed like civilians, but I suspect they’re PLA soldiers in disguise. They’re holding chopping knives and metal rods, and they’re heading for the Square…’

The morning races towards noon, while you still cling to the shadows of your past.

‘It stinks in here!’ my mother grumbles, opening a window. Immediately a current of warm evening air flows through the window of her bedroom, moves into the sitting room, picking up smells of burnt food, brushes past my nose and escapes through the window of the covered balcony.

She wanders off to the toilet. I haven’t heard the plastic flyswatter that hangs from the doorknob rattle, so I know she hasn’t shut the door. It saves her having to turn on the light.

I wonder if the toilet has been redecorated. When I last saw it, there was a carcass of a half-eaten fly suspended in a spider’s web above the door. The toothbrushes and toothpaste were kept in a ceramic cup on a wooden shelf, next to a small tub of scouring powder. It had been so long since I’d used the toothbrush that it was caked in dust. The mirror above the shelf was splattered with water and toothpaste residue and still had a rectangle of glue in the corner where a sticky label had been. I looked out of the tiny window. There was an electric cable hanging out of a window of the building behind. When the cable moved, its shadow moved too.

My mother spoke to Tian Yi on the phone yesterday. I heard her say, ‘The police took us on our “annual trip”. They remove us from Beijing each anniversary of the crackdown and lock us in a hotel in the suburbs for a few days. They say it’s part of their yearly “cleansing of the capital’s political environment”… Huh, it’s not Dai Wei they’re afraid of — he hasn’t the strength even to fart — they just want to make sure I don’t talk to any foreign journalists… No, there’s still no sign of any improvement. I doubt he’ll wake up before I die… You’re coming back to China? You must come and see him, then. I warn you, he’s not a pretty sight. He’s so skinny, you can see his heart and veins pumping under his skin. He’s like one of those transparent watches they sell in the markets now…’

In the summer heat, my skin has become as putrid as a hemp sack of rotting rubbish. My back smells the worst. The medicinal powder my mother sprinkled over it a few days ago has soaked into the raw bedsores, which now smell as caustic as insecticide.

‘Apparently scientists have developed a new drug from cows’ brains that can help repair damaged neurons,’ my mother said to Tian Yi. ‘I know I shouldn’t raise my hopes… Tian Yi, you’re an adult. You understand that everyone needs money to get by in life. Well, I ran out of cash a while ago and had to sell one of his kidneys. But the money I got for it only paid for three months’ worth of medication. I can’t afford to buy him proper medicine now, so I go to the country markets and buy antibiotic solutions that have passed their sell-by date. They’re cheaper, but the quality’s unreliable. Sometimes when I inject them into him, he breaks out in red blotches… Oh, if only he’d just hurry up and die…’

‘Can I say a few words to him?’

‘All right. I’ll put the receiver next to his ear.’

My mother was perched beside me on the bed. She tugged the telephone lead, then shifted towards me, making the metal bedstead squeak.

Tian Yi’s nose was blocked. I could tell she’d been crying. ‘Dai Wei, can you hear me? It’s ten in the morning here… I feel so guilty. I shouldn’t have asked you to come to the Square with me when I joined the hunger strike. I’m the one who should have been shot… Do you want to hear the noises outside?’ She opened her window, and I heard a roar of cars and motorbikes and wind blowing through trees. I could tell it was a big, noisy city.

‘Did he hear it all?’ Tian Yi said to my mother.

‘Yes, all of it. It’s nice of you to still be thinking of him.’ In fact, my mother hadn’t bothered to place the receiver next to my ear, but I was still able to hear everything Tian Yi said.

‘Will you take a photo of him and send it to me? I didn’t bring any of our photographs with me.’

‘His skin is like tree bark. It flakes off in thick layers. How can I photograph him in such a state?’

Tian Yi laughed. ‘Your descriptions are very vivid, Auntie! I must go to work now…’ I knew she’d only laughed to conceal her sobs.

Her voice faded, like a torch whose batteries were dying. Underneath my pillow, I could hear Wen Niao’s watch quietly ticking.

My mother seldom brings the telephone into my room these days. Last week, she started renting out the single bed in the covered balcony to a young graduate called Xue Qin. She’s afraid he might use the phone when she’s out, so she keeps it in her bedroom most of the time. But Xue Qin has made a copy of my mother’s bedroom key. If his pager bleeps while she’s out, he unlocks her door and makes a telephone call. He has rifled through all the drawers in the flat, read my father’s journals, and taken a swig from each of the bottles of rice wine my mother keeps in the cabinet.

‘She’s got a foreign fiancé,’ my mother grumbled when she put down the receiver. ‘What’s she doing asking for photographs of you? If she’s so concerned about your condition, why doesn’t she send us some money? She’s living a nice life abroad, but she’s forgotten we helped her to get there. She hasn’t thanked us once…’