Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

I glanced at the chestnuts roasting in the wok of a street stall outside the entrance, and breathed in their sweet fragrance. Just as I was about to enter the bathhouse, I caught a whiff of the mutton skewers cooking on the stall’s charcoal grill. The smell was so mouth-watering that I turned round and went to buy myself one. I sprinkled the mutton with cumin powder and sat down to eat it on a wooden stool under the street lamp.

I paid for the mutton skewer with the money a shopkeeper had given me for returning our old bottle-tops. My mother had let me keep it. After my father passed away, she often gave me small amounts of pocket money.

A strong wind was blowing around that street corner. It never seemed to let up.

I stared at the lamp on the other side of the street. The parts of the road that it illuminated were busier than the rest. The food stall’s awning rustled in the wind. The air below it smelt of hot brown sugar, mutton and charcoal smoke. People on their way home from work stopped off to buy punnets of dried tofu.

Behind me was a brightly lit shop window, pasted with wedding photographs. The peasant squatting below it turned up the sheepskin collar of his jacket and hunched his shoulders against the wind. All I could see of his face were his sparkling eyes. He was selling a basket of large, pink-fleshed radishes. The radish he’d sliced in half and displayed on the top of the pile was as red as a lamb’s heart.

When I finished the skewer, I pushed through the large quilt that hung across the bathhouse’s entrance, and stepped into the lobby. Immediately, my skin softened in the warm, humid air. There was a synthetic scent of moisturising cream which stung my eyes, and behind it, a fouler stench that reminded me of boiled pigskins. Having just consumed so much greasy mutton, I was struck by a sudden wave of nausea.

Two large portraits of Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng hung in the lobby. Below them was a freshly painted red box in which to post reports of political misconduct and bad behaviour. Next to the box, two women were gazing into a mirror, combing their wet hair. Some of the water dripped onto the ground, the rest ran down the backs of the yellow-and-white jumpers they were wearing. Women were queuing up behind them to comb their hair in front of the mirror. The men didn’t bother to check their appearance. When they walked out into the lobby, they’d just shake their heads, run their fingers through their damp hair then stride outside into the cold.

After I bought myself a ticket, I took off my clothes and headed for the hot pool. White steam rose from its surface. I spotted a space close to the door, gritted my teeth and lowered myself in. I splashed the scorching water onto my face and shoulders in a calm and confident manner, trying to look as though I’d done this many times before. As expected, the other men in the pool shifted their gaze to me, eyeing me with curiosity as I edged myself deeper into the water. They stared at my legs, the strands of hair that had only recently sprouted from my testicles, then glanced at my small, pale nipples.

I had made it. I was an adult now, no longer a child who was afraid of hot water.

Two boys a year or so younger than me were sitting on my left. One of them splashed the water with his feet and said to the other, ‘We call our teacher “Miss Donkey”. When she gets angry, she swears her head off and stamps her feet like this…’

I ignored them. I was a grown-up now, and grown-ups always bathe in silence. I grabbed my bar of soap and rubbed it slowly over my chest.

When people are naked they say very little to each other. They are stripped of their identities. Usually one can guess a person’s status from their hairstyle, but in the bathhouse everyone’s hair is slicked back. The only props they have are the identical white flannels in their hands and their variously sized bars of soap.

Smells of urine and dirty feet rose into the steam above the pool. Occasionally a cold draught blew in from the skylight, allowing my lungs to open up a little.

The man sitting next to me stood up, his bottom wobbling, and climbed out of the water. His flannel had left red streaks across his body that was already scarlet from the heat.

The scrawny old man sitting opposite me was rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. His skin was the same colour as the legs of ham on the butcher’s counter in the local market. When he squeezed his flannel, his expression relaxed slightly. In the typical manner of a regular visitor, he rarely looked anyone in the eye. He moved about with such confidence and lack of inhibition that the rest of us felt as though we were guests in his home. Soon he lifted himself out of the pool and went over to the large tub where the water was heated to an even higher temperature. He slipped inside it without flinching and soaked in the scalding water for several minutes, letting out a soft sigh occasionally to express his pleasure.

I looked down into the water below me and noticed that my penis had swollen. My whole body seemed larger. My feet appeared to have moved further away from my head. My skin stretched tightly over my joints. I knew that, just like my father, I had a large black mole on the small of my back. I was the replica he had made of himself to leave behind in the world after he died.

A crack opens in the darkness, allowing more noises to reach you. These sounds are clearer than the ones you heard before. Although your ears tell you that you’ve returned to the world, you’re still wandering through the intersecting lanes of your memories.

‘It’s not that cold.’ I turned up the collar of my woollen jumper. The air wasn’t too cold, but the ground was freezing. The hard soles of my shoes made a lot of noise as we walked along the pavement. The evening wind blasted down the side of the road which had just been planted with trees.

Lulu whispered, ‘Get off. Don’t touch me. Your hands are freezing. Don’t be such a hooligan…’

There were some large, concrete pipes lying on the pavement, waiting to be buried in a long ditch in the ground. We crawled inside one of them. ‘I’d be frightened to come inside here on my own,’ Lulu said, the wind whistling through her voice.

‘The wind’s dropped again.’ My voice trembled in the cold air. ‘You should have worn a coat.’

‘Let’s crawl a little further inside. I don’t want anyone to see us.’

‘So you’re not going back home tonight, then?’ I swivelled my legs round, sat down, and was relieved to find that there was enough headroom for me to sit up straight.

‘No. My father hit me…’

‘But he’s not even your real father…’ Lulu didn’t react to this comment, so I asked, ‘Did your mother see him hit you?’

‘Keep your voice down. There are people walking past.’

I remember the sound of those footsteps treading over the grit and sand on the pavement. The footsteps would grow louder then slowly fade away.

‘What happened to your real father? He was a percussionist, wasn’t he?’

She squashed her head between her knees and said, ‘My mum told me he was arrested and sent to jail.’

‘What for?’

‘The opera company’s Party secretary accused him of leading an immoral and licentious lifestyle.’

I remembered that I was four years old when I first met my father. At nursery school, I was made to stand outside the classroom during the singing lessons. The teacher said that, as a son of a rightist, I had no right to learn revolutionary songs.

‘You must promise not to tell anyone that my real father’s in jail,’ Lulu whispered. ‘Especially not Suyun. She keeps trying to wheedle the secret out of me. The other day she told me that her father had gone to the cinema with another woman. I knew it was just a ploy to make me open up to her.’ She lifted her face as she spoke. The white steam escaping from her mouth scattered into the cold wind.