Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

The procession immediately came to a halt. Han Dan, Hai Feng and the leaders of each department group stepped to the side and discussed what to do next.

‘They’ve blocked us off before we’ve even reached the Square,’ Cao Ming said. ‘The university must have told them we were coming.’

‘They haven’t got guns, there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Wang Fei said.

Nuwa’s mouth was trembling with fear. ‘We don’t want to get ourselves arrested. It’s the middle of the night. We should turn round and head back to the campus.’

Remembering my previous arrest, I too was nervous, but part of me wanted to keep going and put up a fight.

‘Go and ask them if they’ll let us through,’ Ke Xi shouted, loud enough for the police to overhear. ‘If they won’t, we’ll have to charge into them!’

As our procession began to march forward again, Tian Yi and Bai Ling retreated to the back. Nuwa was walking arm in arm with Wang Fei, so she had no choice but to keep moving. When we were just a few paces away from the police, we halted again.

The policemen remained silent. They didn’t look as though they were planning to make any arrests.

Nuwa stepped forward and said, ‘Dear officers, we citizens are acting in accordance with the constitution…’ but was soon interrupted by Ke Xi, who shouted, ‘Comrade policemen! Fellow countrymen! We have come out tonight, on behalf of students from universities across Beijing, to go to Tiananmen Square and lay memorial wreaths for Comrade Hu Yaobang on the Monument to the People’s Heroes. As we’re sure you can understand, we are very saddened by his death. We sincerely hope that you will let us through…’

The officers stared at him, saying nothing in reply.

We stood where we were and stared back at them, continuing to chant our slogans. Han Dan turned to me and said, ‘Get the students at the back to come forward, so that we can line up facing the police. We’ll stay here shouting slogans and singing songs until they get fed up and let us through.’

Local residents who’d been woken by the commotion poured out onto the pavements to see what was going on.

An hour went by.

Then Ke Xi went over to the policemen again and shouted, ‘You are Chinese citizens, just like us. We are all grieving the death of Hu Yaobang. Please, comrades, let us pass!’ The students behind him cheered and clapped their hands.

After a few minutes of silence, we heard a policeman announce through a megaphone, ‘We were given orders to stand right here, so that’s what we’ll do.’

Once the crowd had understood what this meant, they laughed and cheered and moved forward, weaving their way past the officers and the vans. Some even chanted, ‘The people’s police love the people!’

I couldn’t take this display of leniency at face value. I remembered how brutally the police treated us in 1987, and it seemed unlikely that their attitude could relax so much in just two years. I suspected that they were leading us into some kind of trap.

In the middle of the crowd, Nuwa waved her hands and cried, ‘Beijing University students are fearless!’ She really was the prettiest girl in the university. Tian Yi and Bai Ling were walking hand in hand. I promised myself that if the police started making arrests, I’d make sure that Tian Yi didn’t come to harm.

Shu Tong turned to Han Dan, who was walking beside him, and said, ‘What are we going to do when we get to the Square?’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It was your idea to march there.’

‘Well we must get a speech ready, and draft the petition. Old Fu, borrow a bike from someone and go back to the dorm to work on it. We’ll wait for you in the Square.’

‘All right,’ Old Fu said. ‘I’ll call for a favourable re-evaluation of Hu Yaobang’s career, and a clampdown on official profiteering. Mou Sen, will you help me write it?’

‘OK. Give me that opening paragraph you wrote, Shu Tong.’ Mou Sen grabbed the sheet of paper that Shu Tong handed him, then hurried back to the campus with Old Fu.

Your soul is this heap of flesh, or perhaps it doesn’t exist at all. The internal landscape of your body is riddled with caves.

If only my mother would remove the incontinence pad that’s fallen underneath my bed. She dropped it last week. Although it’s almost dry now, I can still smell the urine. Ever since my sense of smell returned, the odours that have repelled me the most have been my own.

When dusk falls, I can smell the oil on my mother’s sewing machine next door. Sometimes I can smell my herbal pills and the scent of washing powder on the damp clothes draped over the radiator.

I listen to the ringing of bicycle bells and the cooing of pigeons preparing to return to their nests, and long to hear, among those sounds, the metallic noise of Tian Yi’s shoes clipping up the stairwell. I was with her when she went to the cobbler’s shop on the lane outside the campus to have those metal plates nailed to the soles… I open my ears and nostrils and, like a shark that swallows draughts of sea-water hoping to catch a few small fish, I let all the noises outside flood into me. I heard my mother mention to someone that Tian Yi has made two visits, but I must have been unconscious both times, because I have no recollection of them.

Since I’ve been in this vegetative state, I have been able to re-experience smells and sounds from my past. These are the tiny details people generally store in the back of their minds and never get a chance to savour again.

Your flesh is enclosed in skin, your bones enclosed in flesh, your marrow enclosed in bone, but where do you fit in?

We reached the Square before sunrise. As we’d expected, it was filled with mourners and wreaths.

A huge black-and-white portrait of Hu Yaobang had been hung on the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the centre of the Square. We trod through the paper flowers that littered the ground to the north side of the Monument, where seven wreaths had been laid. The largest was from the students of the Politics and Law University. We brought out our wreath and ceremoniously placed it next to the others, while Yang Tao read out the eulogy we had prepared. He was wearing a tight Lenin-style jacket and brown sunglasses. He looked like a newly qualified young professor.

Wang Fei and Nuwa walked over, hand in hand. They were the same height. I guessed that the blue tracksuit he was wearing belonged to her.

We climbed to the upper terrace of the Monument and formed a human ladder so that Hai Feng, who was the lightest of us, could clamber to the top of the obelisk and hang up the long white sheet daubed with the words CHINA’S SOUL. As the first rays of sun lit up the sky, the white cloth turned pale orange.

Hai Feng stood there for a while, addressing the crowd. ‘We’ve made our three demands,’ he concluded. ‘Now let’s see what more we can do!’ His voice was still strong. But after shouting slogans for so many hours, I could hardly speak. I glanced around. The heavy rainfall a few minutes before had driven many students from the Square. Some had rushed over to the north side to watch the daily flag-hoisting ceremony. Others had wandered down to the south end to buy some snacks in the Qianmen market. There were only about two hundred people left in the middle.

I managed to find Tian Yi. I wanted to reassure her that I wouldn’t take part in any future demonstrations. But when I opened my mouth, no noise came out. Chen Di had borrowed my jacket and my shirt was wet. I longed to change into some dry clothes and have a cup of hot tea.

Tian Yi laughed at me and said, ‘Don’t try to speak. You seem wiser when you’re silent. You did a good job tonight. I never realised that you were such a good organiser.’ She smiled. ‘We should go to Hu Yaobang’s private residence and lay some more wreaths there. It’s only six o’clock now.’ The v-neck jumper she was wearing under her waterproof jacket looked snug and warm.