Ha Jin - The Crazed

Together we hurried toward the hospital. All the way the woman raised my shirt high so that the soldiers might not fire at us.

The boy wasn’t heavy, about ninety pounds. Yet soon the old man at the front started panting and tottering, and we had to slow down a little. The street was strewn with caps, bags, shoes, bicycle bells, jackets, plastic ponchos. After three or four turns, we reached a broader street and saw buses and trucks in flames. In fact, by now it looked as though the whole city was burning, fires and smoke everywhere. At one place there was a pile of bicycles crushed by a tank or a personnel carrier — metal and bloody clothing all tangled in a mess. Not far away a group of double-length buses were smoldering, each having a wide gap in the middle, punched by a tank. Here and there were scattered concrete posts, steel bars, bicycle-lane dividers, lampposts, oil drums, even some propane cylinders.

We reached the hospital at about four o’clock. The building was swarming with wounded people, many of whom were dying. Some had already died before they arrived. The boy we had carried over was still breathing, but his heart stopped a few minutes after the nurses pushed him into the operating room. A head nurse told us woefully, “We didn’t anticipate this carnage. We thought they’d use tear gas, so we stocked some eyedrops and cotton balls. Many people died because we didn’t have the medicine and blood they needed.”

I was astounded by the number of the wounded in the hospital. The corridors and the little front yard were crowded with stretchers loaded with people, some of whom held up IV bottles and tubes for themselves, waiting for treatment. A deranged young woman cried and laughed by turns, tearing at her hair and breasts, while her friends begged a nurse to give her an injection of sedative. I was told that there was a morgue here, but it was too small for all the bodies, so some of the dead were stored in a garage in the backyard. I went there to have a look. The tiny morgue happened to adjoin the garage, and three nurses were in there, busy listing the bodies and gathering information about the dead. An old couple were wailing, as they had just found their son lying among the corpses. Most of the dead were shot in the head or chest. I saw that a young man had three bayonet wounds in the belly and a knife gash in the hand. His mouth was wide open as though still striving to snap at something.

But the garage was an entirely different scene, where about twenty bodies, male and female, were piled together like slaughtered pigs. Several limbs stuck out from the heap; a red rubber band was still wrapped around the wrist of a teenage girl; a pair of eyes on a swollen face were still open, as though gazing at the unplastered wall. A few steps away from the mass of corpses lay a gray-haired woman on her side, a gaping hole in her back ringed with clots of blood. My knees buckled. Crouching down, I began retching, but couldn’t bring anything up. On the ground sparks seemed to burst like fireworks as I slapped my chest with both hands to get my wind back.

Three or four minutes later I rose to my feet and staggered away. Reentering the hospital building, I was too exhausted and too numb to do anything, but was still lucid. I wondered whether I should stay in Beijing or return to Shanning. Since it was impossible to reassemble my group, I decided to go back as soon as I could. I asked a nurse for directions; it happened that the train station wasn’t far away. She took off her robe and said, “Put this on. It’s dangerous to be in your bloody clothes.”

I looked down and found my undershirt and pants stained with the boy’s blood. “Don’t you need this?” I asked her about the robe.

“We have plenty.”

I thanked her and slipped on the robe, which turned out to be more than helpful. On my way to the train station, the soldiers didn’t question me, taking me for one of the medical personnel. By now it was already daylight, and the troops seemed too tired to move around. The farther south I walked, the more people appeared on the streets, some of which resembled a battlefield, littered with scraps of metal, bloody puddles, and burned trucks and personnel carriers. I was amazed that the civilians, without any real weapons in their hands, had somehow managed to disable so many army vehicles. Although few guns were fired now, smoke kept rising in the west.

Coming close to the train station, I saw a column of tanks standing along a street. Their cannons pointed north, their engines were idling, and their rears were emitting greasy fumes. The air was rife with diesel fuel. Some civilians were talking to the soldiers; many of them wept and scrunched up their faces. I stopped to watch. An officer in breeches was listening to the civilians attentively and went on sighing and shaking his head in disbelief. Among the crowd an old man held up a long placard that said PUNISH THE MURDERERS! A white banner displayed the slogan THE DEBT OF BLOOD HAS TO BE PAID IN BLOOD!

A young man standing beside me remarked with a thrill in his voice, “These tanks are the most advanced type our country has made, modeled after the Russian T-62. These fellows belong to the Thirty-eighth Army. They’re good troops, moving in to shell those bastards from Datong.”

“Long live the Thirty-eighth Army!” a male voice shouted.

People joined in, raising their fists.

“Wipe out the fascists!” broke from the same man.

Once more people roared together. Their voices quickened my heart a little, and my spirits began to lift. Then I noticed that all the muzzles of the tanks’ cannons still wore canvas hoods, and that all the antiaircraft guns atop the tanks were covered too. My heart sagged again. When I was a small boy, my pals and I had often played near the barracks of an armored regiment garrisoned in my hometown. Occasionally we sneaked into the army’s compound to pick up used batteries and cartridge cases. Whenever the tanks and self-propelled guns rolled out for a live ammunition exercise, they would shed all the canvas hoods and covers before they set off. So now I could tell that the troops in front of me were not prepared to fight a battle at all, and that probably they too had come to smash the “uprising.” These civilians here were misled by their own wishful thinking. I wondered if I should tell them the truth, but decided not to.

Hurriedly I went to the train station, where I ran into two of the undergraduates from my group, a boy and a girl. At the sight of me they broke out sobbing. I had no idea how to comfort them and joined them in weeping.

“I’m going to write a novel to fix all the fascists on the page,” announced the bespectacled girl, stamping her feet. Fierce light bounced off her glasses.

“Yes,” the boy backed her up, “we must nail them to the pillory of history!”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, unsure whether we could fight the brute force with words only, so I remained speechless. The girl was one of those budding poets who had often shown up at the literary gatherings on campus.

Around us were hundreds of students waiting for trains, many of which had been canceled. Some of the youngsters were wounded, weeping or cursing continually. Outside it began raining, the initial downpour pattering on the gray plaza, and whitish vapor leaped up, rolling like waves of smoke, so we couldn’t go out to look for the rest of our group. In fact, we were too terrified to reenter the city. We stayed together in a corner of the waiting hall for a whole day until the first train was available.

Although I’d slept twelve hours since I came back from Beijing, I hadn’t recovered from the trip yet. For a whole day I didn’t go out except at noon, when I went to fetch some hot water and buy a few wheaten cakes at a food stand. When I walked, my legs still trembled a little, so I stayed in bed most of the time. Huran asked me again and again about the massacre in the capital. He had heard of it from the Voice of America, but he didn’t seem surprised, saying he had expected such an outcome. Unlike him, most of the students in the dormitory houses were outraged, and a few brave ones even put on black armbands. Still in shock, I couldn’t talk to Huran at length. I just repeated, “They killed lots of people, lots.”