Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘Yes, we must do it now before the bodies are taken away,’ said Wu Bin. ‘Let’s split forces. I’ll check if there are any bodies outside.’ He rolled up his sleeves and went to find a pen and paper.

‘You check the morgue, the operating theatre and the wards upstairs,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay down here in outpatients.’ I stared at the blood-soaked corridor. I felt so penned in, I could hardly breathe. I saw another injured person lying on a bench, lifting his hand in the air. I went over to him.

His eyes were open. He’d lost half a leg and his chest was wrapped in bandages. I asked him to give me the name of his university and his parents’ address.

‘Don’t tell my mum, whatever you do. I–I was born in this hospital. My name’s Tao. I’m a high school student.’

‘Where were you hurt?’ The bandages around his chest looked very tight. His left leg, which had been severed at the knee, was also covered in bandages.

‘My leg was crushed and I got two bullets in the… chest. The doctor said… I’ll be fine. But I know… I won’t live.’ His face was smaller than my brother’s. His voice hadn’t broken yet. I was about to tell him that he shouldn’t have come out onto the streets but stopped myself just in time.

I fumbled through my pockets, searching for a piece of paper to write his address on, and finally pulled something out. It was the letter that had been handed to me in the Square. My fingers had smeared it with so much blood that I couldn’t make out what it said.

An elderly female doctor shouted, ‘If any of you are with people who have minor injuries, take them home now! The army will be turning up here soon to arrest the injured.’

‘I’m a Beijing University student,’ I said. ‘I want to make a record of the dead and wounded. Can you lend me a pen?’

‘Look, we’ve written their names and work units here,’ she said. ‘There are students, workers and even government cadres. People from every walk of life.’ I looked at the sheets of paper pinned to the corridor wall and realised that it was a list of the dead. The names were numbered. The number of the latest name recorded was 281. The man next to me said, ‘There was an hour or so when we didn’t have time to record all the names. You’d better go to the morgue and the other rooms in the basement to double-check there. People are dying so fast, we can’t keep up.’

I saw Tang Guoxian at the other end of the corridor, leaning his face against the wall and weeping uncontrollably. The muscles of his back shuddered and twitched. A woman in her late thirties walked over to the list. When she saw the name of a loved one on it, she gasped and fainted. The infant at her feet sat wailing on the blood-drenched floor. All the lights overhead seemed to be shaking.

Another casualty was brought in by an old man in his sixties. Everyone moved out of the way to let them through. ‘She’s been shot in the knee,’ the old man said, holding the blood-splattered girl in his arms. ‘She needs an operation immediately.’

‘Someone get me a torch!’ a doctor said, brushing past me.

I borrowed a pen and went back to speak to the boy called Tao. He was lying on the ground now. I knelt down and looked at him. His glazed eyes were staring at the fluorescent-light tubes on the corridor’s ceiling. A nurse was crouched by his side, writing some notes on a piece of paper.

‘Is he dead?’ I asked, my heart thumping.

‘His pupils are fully dilated,’ she said, continuing to scribble her notes without pausing to look up at me. ‘Help me carry him out, will you?’

A wave of nausea swept through me. I wanted to scream. The inside of my mouth twitched. I wanted to put my hand down my throat and wrench my stomach out.

The nurse removed her face mask and said to me, ‘Go on. You take the head.’

I had no choice but to place my hands underneath the boy’s neck. It felt as though he’d broken out in a cold sweat before he died. The back of his head was wet.

The nurse lifted his leg and we carried him to the bicycle shed in the yard outside. There were already about twenty corpses lying there. The white bandages covering their faces, limbs or chests were stained with red or black blood. Some of the corpses had no shoes.

‘Put him down here, quickly!’ The nurse was about to topple over. She was exhausted. We lowered Tao’s body onto the ground. The corpse next to him had a student identity card on his chest. I could see from the cover that it was a Beijing University card. I picked it up and looked at the name. It said CAO MING… I turned away. All I could see was blood. The kind of blood that can never be wiped away. I got up, ran to the wall and retched.

My mother walks to the edge of the room to look at our balcony which is lying in the rubble on the ground. Her shadow sways before my eyes. A loud bang from the bulldozer below frightens her back inside. She grips the frame of my iron bed, squats down and, bursting into tears, pulls out the box of my father’s ashes, and the one she bought for mine. She moves to the edge of the room again, hurls the boxes into the floodlight’s beam and, in her clearest, most resonant tone, sings out, ‘ You are liberated at last! Quickly,run away …’ As she drops to her knees, the sparrow shrieks. It sounds as though it’s fallen off the bed and broken a wing.

A labourer who’s knocking down a wall next door teeters across a broken beam and peers into my room. ‘Bloody hell! The Fascist has gone mad. Call the foreman. If she kills herself, they’ll dock our pay…’

Two or three of them sneak over into my room and shine their torches on the floor. ‘Look — she’s become a vegetable too, now. You can send her off to hospital, and take the other one who’s lying on the bed as well, while you’re about it.’

‘I want to submit a petition! I want go on a march,’ she mumbles. ‘Down with corruption!’

‘Don’t poke her with that stick. If you injure her, you’ll have to pay compensation…’

‘Look, there’s white foam coming out of her mouth…’

‘Down with… Down with… Down… Down…’

‘Be sensible, old lady. Those Hong Kong developers have got the backing of the government. You’re just digging your own grave, acting like this.’

‘I heard that the chairwoman of the company — Zhang Lulu, I think her name is — used to live in this district as a child,’ the drifter says. ‘That’s how the company managed to buy such a bloody big plot of land. They used all her back-door connections.’

So it’s Lulu who is building this shopping centre… My mind returns to those winding lanes we used to wander through together. The ancient trees, the sunlight…

‘I want to go to the Square. I want to go on a hunger strike…’ my mother says blankly.

You are as brave as a solitary red-billed lovebird that flies out alone, gripping tightly to the wind.

I went to sit on the kerb outside the hospital. I looked across the street and saw a restaurant with a sign above it that said LULU’S CAFÉ. I remembered Lulu mentioning that her restaurant was opposite Fuxing Hospital. The door was locked. The painted characters of her name looked like strings of raw bacon. I looked down and saw blood trapped between my toes. I gagged and retched again.

‘If any of you have got any balls, come back to the Square with me and help me rescue some injured people,’ a middle-aged man shouted. I got up and walked over to him. A group of provincial students stumbled towards us, looking dishevelled and exhausted. A few of them had lost their shoes and had wrapped strips of cloth around their feet.

‘Where have you just come from?’ I asked.

‘We were with the last group of students who stayed on the Monument. There’s a massacre taking place in the Square. Don’t go.’