Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Tianyi continued to hold her head high, but she also felt confused and distressed. She could not understand it. Qiang’s entreaties that she should contact Wusheng for him still rang in her ears. She had taken on that responsibility unhesitatingly, for the sake of their friendship. Where had she gone wrong? Where?

But very soon, Tianyi was jolted from this particular crisis and plunged into a much deeper one. This time she was truly shaken to the core.

One day, a dismal drizzle was falling and the Beijing streets were unusually quiet. Tianyi, dressed casually in trousers and a top, slipped quickly into the military compound and to the door of the flat where Zheng’s parents lived. Zheng’s mother had phoned her. She found Mrs Ke with tears pouring down her face. Even Zheng’s father was weeping. Tianyi knew at once that it was serious.

With shaking hands, Zheng’s mother gave her a piece of paper. Tianyi could see it was Zheng’s handwriting but, for a long time, she could not bring herself to read it. She stared vacantly at his mother’s hand, with its stubby, fleshy, carrot-like fingers. Can hands and fingers be inherited, she wondered vaguely? She seemed to see those fingers mixing the mayonnaise, clutching a pair of chopsticks with clumsy earnestness. The tears welled and her eyes misted over.

‘Child, what’s up! What is it? Read the letter!’ Zheng’s mother was shaking her with both hands. The elderly pair were alarmed at her Tianyi’s deathly pallor and rigid expression.

Tianyi pulled herself together and peered at the scribbled writing. She had teased Zheng so often about his terrible handwriting but now all she wanted to do was to press those beloved words against her cheeks, into her heart. ‘If prison conditions don’t improve within two weeks, I’ll take my own life in protest!’

She knew, as everyone who knew Zheng did, that he meant what he said. Just at the time when her head and her heart had been so full of Qiang, Zheng was enduring the hardships of prison. Number Two Prison was different from Qin Cheng Prison, he wrote. Here he only had four square metres of space, one-third of which was taken up with the latrine, which teemed with maggots in hot weather. The stink was terrible. He was tormented by flies, mosquitoes and fleas, and covered in lumps and bumps from their bites. The itching was unendurable, and he scratched and scratched, until he had wounds so deep that he could see the bone gleaming white underneath!

When she left Zheng’s parents that day and got on the metro, she wept uncontrollably, beyond embarrassment and ignoring the shocked stares of her fellow passengers. She just wanted to know why. Why was the goddess of liberty so pitiless? People had not advanced a single step in a hundred years, and every step forward had to be paid for with someone’s blood! The state was a meat grinder, one enormous meat-grinder that had destroyed the dreams of those whom the heavens loved. How many exceptional men and women had been minced to fragments in its jaws? Wasn’t the law of nature survival of the fittest? But it was the best who were being destroyed by this process, the best! How many really excellent people had fallen in the last few years? Too many!

Many years later, when she mentioned Zheng’s time in prison to his parents again, she found them indifferent. The old man chuckled: ‘Wherever our boy goes, he’s always lucky. Even those years he spent in prison, he really got treated well.’ He talked as if it were all a lifetime ago. Distressed, Tianyi protested gently: ‘He had a terrible time in Number Two Prison. He got a message out to me that he was going to kill himself in protest at the conditions.’ But then she realized that this was quite the wrong thing to say. There was not the slightest reaction from anyone except for Zheng’s mother. This woman who back then had wept and begged Tianyi to help, now said dismissively: ‘That was only for a short time. Why rake it all up again now?’ Tianyi’s mouth dropped open and she looked from one person to another. Every one of them was busy stuffing their mouths with food. No one appeared in the slightest bit moved.

She was surprised at how very clear it all remained in her own memory. She had taken the letter that day to a friend, Fang, who ran the Rule of Law journal. He, in turn, took the risky step of informing someone very high up in the government via an internal memo. The official scribbled an instruction on it, the horrors that Zheng had endured at Number Two prison came to an end and he was transferred to the prison ward of a hospital on the outskirts of the city. She actually took Fang to meet Zheng’s parents who were most grateful for his help. But memories fade, and the whole episode became for them something ‘not worth raking up’. Tianyi found it chilling.

And so she came to realize that total amnesia had afflicted an entire people. The Chinese were so apathetic that they had simply decided not to pass judgment, to forget the disastrous decade of the Cultural Revolution. It had destroyed their lives, but they innocently imagined that this history would never be repeated. Yet it was repeated in 1989, on ground already soaked with blood, just because the perpetrators had escaped justice the first time round.

She was overwhelmed by her longing for Zheng, and wept until she had no more tears to cry.

One day, Xiao’ou reappeared in Tianyi’s life. It was an unusually bright Beijing morning when someone knocked at the door. In those days, friends rarely phoned in advance, they just turned up. Tianyi opened the door, to see a tall figure silhouetted against the light. The sun’s rays made the hairs of his head look almost transparent, and before she saw his face, she knew it was Xiao’ou. She was exhausted, not having slept well, and it showed in her puffy face. Worst still, she had not had time to wash her face and comb her hair. She looked a mess, and felt in no state to welcome an old friend, even one she had not seen for so long.

Xiao’ou did not seem to notice, though. He spoke excitedly about his recent doings, about the terrible night of 4th June, when by some lucky fluke he made his escape from the Square, and about the terrible scenes he had witnessed there.

‘You’re a friend of Zheng, aren’t you?’

‘Who told you?’ she asked quietly.

‘Fang.’ Then, after a pause: ‘A bunch of friends are going on an outing to Huairou County tomorrow. Do you want to come?’

‘Who’s going?’

‘Fang, for starters. Everyone wants to know what’s happened to Zheng, and do what they can to help.’ That was how she found out that Zheng and Xiao’ou were friends. Small world!

The next day, she dressed carefully, putting on a blue-and-white batik skirt, tying her hair into a ponytail and applying a little makeup. Then she called goodbye to Lian and set off.

When they were in the minibus, she realized that this was a circle of people she had never met before. Such friendship groups had flourished after the Cultural Revolution ended, the more pretentious ones calling themselves ‘Salons’. She always stuck by her friends — those she got to know through Zheng at the beginning of the eighties were like her family. But after June 1989, they had scattered, some going abroad, others taking refuge wherever they could. For Tianyi, a life swept bare of friends was no life at all so she was pleasantly surprised to be introduced to new ones today. You only had to exchange a couple of sentences in Beijing to get a general idea whether someone could become a friend. There was a sort of secret language that told you immediately.

Only one friend from the old days was on the bus, Zheng’s ex-girlfriend, Xi. The famous boyfriend Tianyi had heard so much about, a rock singer, was there too. Rock stars were then as rare as the morning star in the sky and Tianyi was curious to talk to him, but he seemed to have nothing interesting to say. Xi, however, was as bubbly as ever, and full of endless questions, and the two women spent the trip catching up.