Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘Tell us about that time you swore at the policeman,’ Yu Jin said, patting the drifter’s shoulder.

That was one of the drifter’s favourite stories. One day, he was caught short while walking down the street. He pulled down his trousers and was just about to pee, when a policeman walked up behind him and said, ‘You can’t piss on the pavement! Pull up your trousers!’

‘Who pissed? Did this piss?’ the drifter said, waving his dick.

‘Why have you brought it out then?’

‘It belongs to me, doesn’t it?’ the drifter answered. ‘I’m just taking a look. Is that against the law?’

The policeman was flummoxed. All he could say was: ‘Well, you’ve seen it now, so hurry up and put it away.’

The drifter hadn’t shaved for months. His beard had grown so long that security guards had arrested him twice recently, suspecting him of being a dissident artist. It was during the week when a band of avant-garde artists put on a show at the Beijing Art Gallery which involved shooting guns into the air.

‘Chen Di, get your binoculars out and show them to the drifter,’ Yu Jin said loudly. ‘They’re our dorm’s mascot. They were made in the Soviet Union.’ Chen Di’s binoculars were a type that was usually issued only to high-level military cadres. He wouldn’t tell us where he’d got them from. Even Cao Ming, whose father was an army general, had been amazed by how powerful they were.

‘Apparently there’s been some trouble at Nanjing University,’ Xiao Li said. ‘A black student was beaten up by some Chinese students for taking a Chinese girl back to his dorm.’ Xiao Li had drunk too much. His face was bright red. He was eighteen, but looked much younger. When Mao Da stood next to him, you would have thought they were father and son.

‘Did you hear that, Drifter?’ said Qiu Fa. ‘A black student was beaten up for sleeping with a Chinese girl. Do you think that was right?’ His curly hair was clean and tidy. He washed it three times a week, and brushed his teeth twice a day.

‘Yes, tell us, do you think he deserved it?’ asked Zhang Jie. This guy was so quiet and reserved, I often forgot he was there. When I glanced over at him, all I saw were his dark, glassy eyes and grimy shirt collar.

Mao Da was sitting next to Qiu Fa, chewing peanuts. He pulled off his khaki jacket and said, ‘Of course the foreigner deserved it. Serves him right for bringing dishonour to the Chinese people.’

The drifter didn’t know much about black people, but had enough of an idea to say, ‘A black guy, as black as coal, dares lay his hands on one of our women? We’ve got men of our own to do that! What a scandal! Beat him up, I say, beat him up!’ He flicked his hand in the air like a policeman, almost hitting Zhang Jie who was sitting beside him.

Everyone laughed.

‘Dong Rong, your girlfriend just called,’ said Wang Fei wandering into our room with a cigarette in his mouth. ‘And have you heard? The students of Nanjing University staged a mass march today to protest against the preferential treatment given to foreigners. But they were also calling for political reform and human rights.’ A couple of days before, Wang Fei had told me that we should take advantage of the row between Shu Tong and Liu Gang to reshuffle the posts in the Pantheon Society. I said that, even if there was a reshuffle, he wouldn’t get a post. No one had a very good opinion of him.

‘The reform process has reached a crucial juncture,’ Mao Da said, in the flat tones of a government official. ‘This isn’t the time to take to the streets.’

‘Yes, we caused enough trouble last time,’ Chen Di moaned. Then he turned to Wang Fei and said, ‘What are you smoking? Can I have one?’

Wang Fei ignored him and shot me a knowing look instead. ‘You’ve been humping that girl again, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘Just look at the state of you! Bet you shot at least two loads last night!’

‘Fuck off, Wang Fei!’ I said, feeling the alcohol in my blood flowing down to my legs. I didn’t want the conversation to turn to me.

Of the eight boys in our dorm, Chen Di and I were the only ones to have brought our girlfriends back. Mao Da and Dong Rong’s girlfriends lived outside Beijing. The previous week, Wang Fei had brought back a tourism student from Xian. She popped into our dorm, and after a few minutes chatting with us, became completely smitten with Cao Ming.

Outside, the nightly news report blared through the university loudspeakers: ‘The State Council has issued an emergency notice calling for strict controls to be placed on migrant labour…’

‘Shut the window, I don’t want to hear that bullshit!’ Wang Fei said, passing his cigarette to Yu Jin. ‘Let’s get sloshed tonight. Come on! Friend or foe, down in one go!’

When Dong Rong, Mao Da and Yu Jin got the pack of cards out, I knew the dorm would soon become a gambling den again, so I went next door and collapsed on Wang Fei’s bed.

The wound in your temporal lobe quivers, your memories blur.

‘A survey found that seven thousand out of the eight thousand girls who graduated last year had lost their virginity,’ Wang Fei said, sitting on the edge of his bunk. ‘Who would have guessed?’

‘Let’s turn the lights out and go to sleep.’ When Shu Tong closed his eyes, his face became a pale, featureless blob.

I was spending the night in Wang Fei’s dorm so that Chen Di could sleep with his girlfriend. Xiao Li, Dong Rong and the others had gone to a room downstairs. The male dorms weren’t supervised as strictly as the female dorms. If a girl dared stay overnight, the rest of us would cooperate and leave the couple in peace. It was easier at the weekends, because the caretaker seldom came up to check.

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Liu Gang said. ‘The seven thousand girls in the survey only said they didn’t disapprove of sex before marriage, they didn’t say they’d indulged in it. They’d never confess to that!’ His girlfriend was at university in Anhui Province. They wrote each other long letters.

‘A survey conducted by the Maths Department found that 27 per cent of students had had sex before they started university,’ someone else piped up from a lower bunk. When men lie in the dark together, their conversation inevitably turns to women.

The lights in the dorm had been switched off, but a glow from the lamps outside filtered through the window. I could see photographs of film stars torn from a calendar pasted to the wall behind Wang Fei. Their eyes stared intently ahead. In the dark, smoky air, the women looked like empresses from some mysterious realm.

Old Fu on the bed above me was listening to Voice of America. He took the TOEFL exam every year, and always got high grades. He was hoping to get a place at Harvard.

I could smell the steamed bun that had burned while being heated over an electric hob, and the jar of spicy fermented tofu that Wang Fei kept in his bedside cabinet.

I was lying on someone’s empty bed. My mind was troubled, but I didn’t want anyone to know. Something terrible had happened between Tian Yi and me, and I hadn’t seen her for two days.

‘You’re the one who’s been bonking all the virgins,’ Shu Tong said to Wang Fei, tapping the side of his bed with a book. ‘That girl you took behind your bed curtain last night, I bet she was another one.’

‘Whatever happens behind this curtain is my own business,’ Wang Fei called back. ‘You should respect my human rights.’

‘Was she a virgin?’ Old Fu asked suddenly. Although he was older than the rest of us, he’d never had a girlfriend.

‘You made so much noise I didn’t sleep a wink all night,’ Shu Tong grumbled.

Big Chan and Little Chan walked in. The dust blown in from the corridor always reeked of the men’s toilets, and made you want a cigarette. Big Chan switched the lights on and Little Chan dumped a thermos of hot water onto the table. When Big Chan poured some hot water into his lunch box, I immediately smelt a whiff of bean sprouts. Everyone suspected that Big Chan had tricked the drifter into leaving the campus the week before, because it was his dorm’s turn to look after him this week.