Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

I couldn’t believe it. This was one of the thugs who’d swindled us in the woods of the Old Summer Palace. I recognised his voice instantly, but fortunately Tian Yi didn’t. I stared at his back as he walked away.

That expression, caught in mid-flow, lies immersed in coagulated blood.

More tanks approached the Square from the east, followed by line after line of soldiers advancing like rows of moving walls.

I saw a girl who looked like Nuwa walk towards the martial law troops, her red skirt fluttering behind her as she went. The people squatting behind the cement wall of the underpass entrance stood up and followed her, shouting, ‘The People’s Army loves the people!’ There were now twenty or thirty people standing in front of the troops in the north-east corner of the Square. Among the crowd, I spotted a gangly Provincial Students’ Federation marshal who’d attempted to depose Tang Guoxian the day before. His fist was raised high in the air.

The gunfire resumed again. Several people were hit. Some of them staggered backwards, some fell and rolled about in agony. Others dropped flat on their stomachs and lay still. But the girl in the red skirt was unscathed. She continued to walk towards the guns that were pointing straight at her. Then, when she was just two or three metres away from them, a shot was fired… Her left foot stepped backwards, her arms and body tilted forward, then she lost balance and crumpled onto the ground.

‘Fucking hell! They’re executing people in cold blood!’ I looked away. I couldn’t bear to watch. My heart was thumping. I turned to look at Tian Yi. She was sitting down, her eyes tightly closed and her teeth clamped over her lower lip. She looked as though she was about to faint. I knelt down and put my arm around her.

‘I’ll take you over to the Red Cross tent. It’s just over there.’ I wanted to find a doctor and ask him to give her a tranquilliser.

‘The monsters! They’re killing people!’ she said, her body trembling all over.

Nurses in white coats ran past us to tend to the students lying on Changan Avenue. I pulled Tian Yi up and tried to drag her towards the Red Cross tent, but she couldn’t move her legs, so I heaved her onto my back and carried her. A wailing ambulance was parked outside the tent. The blue-andwhite light of its rotating beacon dazzled my eyes. When we got there, two nurses and a student arrived carrying the girl in the red skirt by her arms and legs. I looked down. It was Nuwa. She’d been shot in the thigh. Blood was gushing from the wound. Her blood-drenched toes were as clenched as bird claws. One of her red sandals was dangling from her foot by a thin leather strap.

A nurse squatted on the ground and shouted, ‘Quick, bandage her leg! We must get her into the ambulance as soon as possible! Put her down. She needs to lie flat on her back.’

Tian Yi pushed me away, untied the towel from her arm, leaned down and put it over Nuwa’s thigh. The nurse pressed the towel deep into the bullet wound and wrapped a long strip of gauze around it to hold it in place. Then Tian Yi and I took Nuwa’s feet, the nurse took her arms and we carefully lifted her up. Steam rose from the drops of blood that dripped onto the concrete paving stones.

‘Don’t let her die!’ Tian Yi cried out suddenly.

‘She wanted to tell the soldiers to stop shooting,’ the nurse said. ‘The guns were pointing straight at her, but she kept walking towards them. She was helping me drag away the wounded just a few minutes before.’

When the nurse looked up, I realised it was Wen Niao. The cap above her thick eyebrows was smeared with blood. She wiped the blood from her hands onto her white coat. ‘Quickly, let’s put her into the ambulance. You’re the security chief, aren’t you? Tell your student marshals to move away from the troops. There’s a massacre taking place!’

‘We know this girl. She’s a Beijing University student.’ I could hardly breathe. My vision blurred. We carried Nuwa into the ambulance and tied her to a stretcher. ‘What about him?’ I said, spotting another body lying outside the rescue tent.

‘He’s dead already,’ Wen Niao said, breathing heavily. ‘He got hit by two bullets.’

I knelt down and took a closer look. A jolt of horror ran through me. He looked like Mou Sen, but I didn’t dare believe it was him. One of his eyes had been blown out and his face was covered in hair and blood. I slipped my hand into his pocket and found my packet of cigarettes.

‘Mou Sen! Mou Sen! It’s too much!’ I howled at the top of my voice. My legs shook as though struck by bullets.

I heard Wen Niao shouting, ‘Hurry up, we’re leaving!’ I turned round and saw her pushing Tian Yi into the ambulance. She banged twice on the door and shouted, ‘Go, go!’

‘Take care, Dai Wei…’ Tian Yi said, stretching her hand towards me. As she unfurled her fingers, the shiny bullet cartridge she’d been clasping flew into the night sky. I watched the ambulance speed off, its siren wailing loudly again, and felt my chest tighten.

‘That’s probably the last trip it will make tonight,’ Wen Niao said. ‘It might get to the hospital, but I doubt it will be allowed back again.’

‘This guy here was my best friend. The girl who got shot is his girlfriend — no, his wife.’ My mouth was so dry, I could hardly speak. I stared at the blood on Mou Sen’s hair, which I’d cut myself, and thought about how, a few moments before, he’d been alive and in love. I couldn’t understand how he could be dead so suddenly.

‘That wound in her thigh was deep. It was haemorrhaging badly. She won’t survive.’ After Wen Niao said this, she turned and pushed her way into the Red Cross tent.

Blood rushed to my head. Everything went dark. I looked down again at Mou Sen. His red eyeball gleamed with reflected light. I crouched down and rubbed his chest, trying to shake him awake. ‘Are you really dead? It’s too much, Mou Sen. I won’t let you die like this.’ I opened the cigarette pack. There were still two cigarettes inside.

I sat down beside him. The glint in his eye was strange and unfamiliar. He looked nothing like my father did when he died. His face, teeth, hair, neck and goatee were covered in blood. I had his blood and Nuwa’s blood all over my hands.

My mind went blank. I didn’t know what to think any more or where to look.

Inside the emergency tent, the nurses were packing away the medical supplies into cardboard boxes and getting ready to carry out the wounded. They pushed everyone with minor injuries out of the tent and said, ‘Hurry up and leave the Square!’

On Fajiu Mountain lives a bird with a white beak and red claws. It is the reincarnation of Emperor Yandi’s daughter who drowned in the East Sea. It cries out ‘Jingwei, jingwei’, so people call it the jingwei bird. Every day, it picks up twigs and stones from the mountain and drops them into the East Sea, trying in vain to fill it up.

A student who’d just had his arm bandaged ran towards the troops shouting, ‘You’ll pay for this, you murderers!’ I grabbed him and said, ‘Go back to the Monument, my friend, and tell everyone what’s happened. Hurry!’

The government loudspeakers overhead were still droning the same announcements. ‘A serious counter-revolutionary riot has broken out in Beijing. Thugs have stolen the army’s ammunition and set fire to army trucks. Their aim is to destroy the People’s Republic of China. We must launch a resolute counter-attack…’ An armoured personnel carrier careered past the Great Hall of the People, knocking over a man pushing a bicycle. I left Mou Sen’s corpse, ran over to where the man had fallen and helped the crowd rebuild the roadblock that the armoured carrier had rammed through. A few workers tossed petrol bombs onto the vehicle’s roof.