Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

On the north face of the mountain, the earth is red. A bird with six eyes lives there. Whenever it appears, a calamity will befall the land.

The tanks and armoured personnel carriers lined up on the north side of the Square began rumbling towards us, followed by a huge mass of helmeted soldiers. My head was juddering so much I couldn’t see clearly.

Wang Fei, Tang Guoxian and I sat at the front of the crowd and watched the vehicles get into line, and the sea of troops behind them organise themselves into neat columns.

I regretted not carrying Mou Sen’s corpse out of the way. A tank had already flattened the emergency tent.

Hou Dejian and Zi Duo went to negotiate with the martial law troops. When they came back, the crowd cleared a path for them allowing them to return to the upper terrace.

Soon, the students’ loudspeakers came on. ‘This is Hou Dejian speaking. We’ve just had a private discussion with the army officials. They say that, as long as you all withdraw from the Square now, they will guarantee that no one will come to harm. The four of us entreat you to leave. You can’t fool yourselves any longer. If you don’t leave now, no one will come out of this alive…’ Although his voice wasn’t very loud, everyone could hear it. ‘I know that the students who are still here in the Square aren’t afraid of dying. But you can’t give up your lives like this, for nothing! There is still so much you can achieve…’ His hoarse cry was swallowed by the night.

Suddenly all the lights went out. The Square and the sky were pitch black. The only specks of light were from the fires still flickering in the distance.

‘Fuck it! If I’d known they’d do this I would have brought a torch.’

‘The bastards! They don’t have the guts to launch the crackdown with the lights on!’

The crowd became agitated. A few girls began to shriek in panic.

‘Fellow students! Please don’t stand up or move around!’ Old Fu shouted through a megaphone. ‘We don’t want anyone to get trampled on.’

I got up and shouted, ‘Student marshals, this is Dai Wei speaking, head of security. This is it. The moment has come. You must all stand up now and link arms, and protect the crowds behind you.’

At that moment, thousands of helmeted soldiers came running out from the Great Hall of the People in the west and moved towards us. Wu Bin jumped up, pulled out a petrol bomb from his jacket and unscrewed the top. ‘If anyone dares come near me we will go up in flames together! I am doing this to avenge Mou Sen’s death!’ Before he had a chance to reach for his lighter, Tang Guoxian pounced on top of him and grabbed his hands. I smelt the petrol spilling onto the ground.

‘Where’s the lighter?’ I said, trying to snatch the bottle from Wu Bin’s hand. Everyone around us panicked and pushed back into the crowd behind, trying to edge away from the smell of petrol.

In the darkness I heard a voice cry, ‘Dai Wei? Is there anyone called Dai Wei here?’

A student handed me a letter and said that someone at the back of the crowd had passed it down. The paper felt smooth between my fingers, but it was too dark for me to read what it said, so I put it in my pocket.

Tang Guoxian managed to grab the cigarette lighter and bottle from Wu Bin’s hands. Someone in the distance lit a fire. The red flames made my blood run faster.

‘Throw away your walkie-talkie, Wang Fei,’ I said, spotting a red light glinting on its metallic cover.

‘I’m not using it. Anyway, the batteries have run out.’

The national anthem blared out again from the loudspeakers on the Monument. ‘ Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves! With our flesh and blood, let us build a new Great Wall! ’ As we sang along, we began to relax a little. It occurred to me that most of the people who’d been shot by the Party since 1949 had shouted ‘Long live the Communist Party!’ when the bullets were fired. I wondered whether I, too, was going to die singing the national anthem beneath the national flag. I thought about A-Mei and wondered whether she was in the Square, and whether the letter I’d been handed was from her. I hoped she was sitting safely in a hotel room.

In the distance, we heard the Goddess of Democracy crash to the ground. Everyone yelled, ‘Down with Fascism!’ Red signal flares shot into the sky, and suddenly the troops lined up directly opposite us. A dozen soldiers lay down on their stomachs, pointed machine guns at us and placed their fingers on the triggers.

The muzzles were black holes. I knew that if they lit up, I would share the same fate as Mou Sen. My veins started throbbing. Everyone linked arms. Our limbs tensed as the roar of the tanks grew louder.

Hou Dejian cried through the loudspeakers, ‘Your lives are precious. Don’t throw them away needlessly!’

Then Old Fu shouted, ‘It’s too dark for a show of hands. Let’s take a voice vote. If you think we should stay in the Square, shout “stay”!’

‘Stay!’ The bellowing cries made the crowd seem united.

‘If you think we should go, shout “go”!’

‘Go!’ Although this response was softer, it was produced by more voices.

‘Why did you shout “stay” then shout “go”?’ Tang Guoxian asked Wang Fei, who was sitting beside him.

‘I just needed to shout,’ Wang Fei said. ‘I can’t hold my anger in any longer. Those fucking bastards!’

After the vote, Old Fu said, ‘The response for us to go was louder. So I now declare that we will withdraw from the Square! Everyone must file out through the south-east corner…’

The lights in the Square came back on. A second later, the machine guns opened fire, spraying rounds of bullets at the loudspeakers above us. The bullets screeched past our heads, hit the Monument’s obelisk and showered the cement ground with chips of stone. The students packed on the upper terrace screamed. Now that the loudspeakers had been silenced, the soldiers set to work. Some went to smash the shelters, others knelt down and aimed their rifles at us. The rest moved forward, skirting the spilt petrol that Tang Guoxian had just set light to.

Then a detachment of helmeted soldiers and armed police charged towards us wielding electric batons. They kicked and pushed their way to the top terrace and began driving everyone off the Monument. Soldiers with bayonets rushed up there too, and stared menacingly at the students climbing down to the lower terrace, prodding with their bayonets anyone who moved too slowly. They clubbed the students who were sitting on the steps. A few guys were beaten so badly their faces were covered in blood.

‘They’ve gone up to arrest the ringleaders,’ Wu Bin shouted. ‘Quickly, let’s go and protect Bai Ling.’ He and Tang Guoxian ran up the steps. Wang Fei followed behind. But without his glasses, he couldn’t see a thing, and he soon tripped and fell. I hurried over and pulled him to his feet. But as I stood up again, a soldier behind me knocked me to the ground…

The past surges forward like white waves crashing into a bay.

It’s the evening of Christmas Day. My thoughts are racing about wildly, because at this very moment, on the other side of the world, Tian Yi is about to get married.

My mother packed her suitcase and left home again this afternoon. A migrant labourer has just brought her back. He found her lying on the ground fast asleep, clutching her suitcase to her chest, while the bulldozers and trucks roared around her.

The communal heating has been turned off. This building is like an empty rubbish bin standing in the snow.

The only warm patch of skin on my body now is the place over my heart where the sparrow is sitting. I think of the freezing concrete pipe in which I hid with Lulu. I think of my father picking up his violin as he lay on his deathbed and playing a hymn. Although two of the strings screeched a little, he played with great earnestness. The last few notes seemed to hover between earth and heaven.