Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Winter. The toilet block is unbearably cold and damp. I breathe out fog and shiver under the sinks, reading sheets of toilet paper. When the Red Guards came back to school, they ransacked the library, clearing the shelves of every book not authored by Chairman Mao. Most of the books were razed on a bonfire, but some were torn up for toilet paper, as ‘poisonous weeds’ are fit only for ‘wiping our backsides’. Though a sorry fate for literature, the sheets of toilet paper are my salvation during the bleak winter days, as I read Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber and other banned volumes, escaping through the pages into illicit other worlds.

One day I am lost in the Book of Odes when footsteps approach the toilet block. Scared of being caught reading the Propaganda of the Capitalist Classes, I throw the toilet paper aside, grab a rag and pretend to be scrubbing the floor. Head down, on my knees, I scrub and wait for the unexpected visitor to go into a toilet stall. But the footsteps walk over to where I crouch instead. I look up.

‘ Liya? ’

You stand in the pallid winter light coming through the window. Your eyes are blackened and swollen, the lids welded shut. There are bald patches on your head and cuts on your legs seeping blood and pus. Your mother’s silk qipao hangs in shreds.

‘Liya, is that you ?’

You breathe in shallow exhalations. ‘Who else. . would be wearing this dress?’

The high-ranking Party official’s daughter is gone. They have persecuted the high status out of you. They have proved you are just like the rest of us, with hair that rips out and blood that leaves the body through wounds. I wince at the cuts on your legs. They need to be disinfected and stitched up at the hospital, or they won’t heal. I take a deep, shaky breath.

‘Liya,’ I say, ‘my mother has a bottle of iodine at home. I can run home and bring it for you. .’

‘Don’t bring me iodine, Moon. . Or I will report you for collaborating with a class enemy.’

You smile bleakly. Are you joking? I can’t tell from your empty gaze. They have persecuted the life out of your eyes.

‘But your wounds are infected. .’

You say nothing to this, seeming not to care about your limbs rotting away.

‘How did you get out of Headteacher Yang’s office?’ I ask. ‘Have the Red Guards released you?’

You hold up your clenched fist. There’s a toothbrush in its grip. ‘Reporting for duty, Comrade Yi,’ you say. ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’

The sight of the toothbrush is so pitiful I start to cry. Is this what I hoped for when I led the Red Guards to the box hidden under your floorboard? For you to be beaten until your head swelled black and blue? For your hair to be dragged out at the roots, leaving your scalp bleeding and bare?

‘I am sorry I betrayed you. .’ I whisper.

You stare back, unmoved. ‘My father was expelled from the Party and imprisoned for counter-revolutionary crimes,’ you state flatly. ‘They would have tortured me anyway.’

Pipes leak and drip on to the cement floor. In the distance is the chanting of a denunciation rally. A teenage girl shrieks hysterically into a loudspeaker. The sound is exhausting to me.

‘I don’t blame you, Yi Moon. .’ you say. ‘I looked the other way when they persecuted you. .’

‘You stopped the Red Guards from raiding our home!’

‘I could have done more, but I didn’t want to risk my status. . I was a bad friend. . I deserve your hate.’

I go and put my arms around you. ‘I’ve never hated you,’ I whisper.

I breathe in your rankness and the septic odour of your wounds. They have been starving you, and you are thin as a stalk of bamboo.

‘Yi Moon. .’ your voice is a low mosquito hum in my ear ‘. . I need your help. .’ You move out of my embrace. You press a hard, smooth, metal object into my hand. I look down. A penknife. ‘I stole it when Martial Spirit wasn’t looking,’ you say. ‘Don’t worry. She won’t miss it. She has plenty of knives.’

My heart beats faster. I stare at the penknife and fear shunts my chest, knocking the air out of my lungs. I stare at you, bleeding, bruised and paler than the dead. But behind their swollen lids, your eyes are burning and intense. Brought back to life by your will to die.

‘Why me?’

‘My wrist is broken. A couple of my fingers are too. I don’t have the strength. .’

I turn the penknife over and click out the blade. Short, but brutal and sharp. I imagine it cutting your wrist. Slicing through skin, blood vessels and tendons. I shudder and retract it again.

‘Liya,’ I say carefully, ‘the Cultural Revolution will be over in a few months, just like the Anti-rightist campaign was. Your father will be released from prison and rehabilitated. Your wounds will heal. Life will get better.’

‘My father won’t be released from prison,’ you say. ‘He died there yesterday.’

‘ Oh . .’

‘I deserve to die, Yi Moon. I am a murderer. During the home raids I kicked people to death. I dragged a woman by a dog’s leash around her neck until she was strangled dead. I gouged the eyes out of a dead man’s head and crushed them in my bare hands.’

What you say is sickening and can’t be true. But I look into your eyes, and know you are not lying. I say weakly, ‘All the Red Guards have blood on their hands. .’

‘Then we all deserve to die.’

‘I can’t do it, Liya.’

‘You can .’ You go down on your knees on the damp cement. You hold out your thin, blue-veined wrists. You look up at me from this begging posture, your bruised eyes pleading with mine. ‘You can . .’

You lift your wrists higher, baring them for the blade. Your arms are shaking from the exertion, and tears sting my eyes, because I know then that I will do it. I will do it out of mercy, because it is the most humane thing to do. I will do it out of love.

My breath shuddering, I reach for your left hand. I click out the blade and slash your inner wrist as hard as I can. You gasp, and your eyes go wide. I let your hand go, and we both stare as the thin line of red widens and drips, the cement darkening as your blood escapes. You breathe in sharp intakes of breath.

‘The other one,’ you say. ‘Hurry.’

You hold out the other wrist, and I reach for it and slash again. This time you don’t gasp. This time you turn your head up, as though to God in Heaven, and yell, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’

You crawl to a metal bucket of stagnant water and plunge your wrists in. As you crouch there I want to rip my shirt up for tourniquets, to staunch death’s flow. But I betrayed you once. I can’t betray you again.

When you lose consciousness, you slump and the bucket capsizes, spilling a tide of red across the floor. I kneel over you and the mess of your wrists. You have stopped bleeding. Your heart has stopped beating.

‘Sorry,’ I hear myself sob. ‘Sorry.’

In the distance, a teenage girl shrieks through a loudspeaker and hundreds of schoolgirls chant. I touch my fingers to your bruised and battered face. I deserve to die, Yi Moon. I am a murderer , you said. Now I am a murderer too, and cannot live with my conscience either.

The knife is within reaching distance. I grasp the handle before I lose my nerve, and turn the blade on my own wrists. Once. Twice. Shock numbs the pain. Struggling for breath, I lay down beside you and hold your hand. There’s a roaring in my head. The roaring of our Great Helmsman, furious that I have betrayed him. The roaring of the masses, furious that I have taken my fate in my own hands. Then there is silence, darkness and reprieve.

UNFORTUNATELY, I DID not die. I woke in a hospital bed, my head throbbing, and my wrists aching beneath thick bandages. When she saw I was awake, the patient in the next bed yelled for the nurses, who rushed to my bedside and started chanting, ‘Down with Yi Moon! Down with Yi Moon!’ Big-character Posters condemning my suicide attempt covered the walls. I saw one that said, The Masses Rejoice in the Death of the Counterrevolutionary Zhang Liya . And I was relieved that you were spared the persecution I was about to suffer.