Ma Jian - Red Dust

She panics and says, ‘I must get back tonight.’

Our footsteps dart through the still air.

When we reach Suoyang, the sun is still watching me in the west.

I climb the ramparts. The stone desert continues to the south, sand dunes roll to the east, five or six pagodas rise in the west. Below me stand the weathered bricks of the rectangular city wall. The buildings within are buried under metres of sand and clumps of shrub and camel-thorn.

I climb down, take some water from my bottle then pass it to Mili.

I see a willow in a dip by the far corner of the wall. Its withered trunk arcs through the green branches like a long sigh.

‘That must be where the well was,’ I say.

‘Yes. A hundred thousand soldiers drank from it for five years and its waters never ran dry.’

Fragments of Tang and Song pottery lie scattered on the sand. I pick one up and examine the intricate moulding.

I imagine the imperial warriors standing on these walls, hurling their spears and rocks at the enemy hordes. I picture women crouched by the willow, filling their jars from the well, then rushing home with heads bowed. . Apart from the sound of our breathing, everything is quiet.

I yell. The noise melts into the soft walls. I tell Mili to shout. She does, and her cry shatters the brittle air. We climb to the highest part of the wall and sit down. I open a packet of biscuits and gaze at the sun.

‘Those pagodas are beautiful,’ I say, viewing them through the lens of my camera.

‘See the hollow in front of them? It’s an ancient burial site. There are human bones everywhere.’

I put down my camera and watch the sun turn a deep red.

When it sinks out of view, a swarm of mosquitoes engulfs us. We whisk them away and run into the wind, but our hands and necks are soon swollen with bites. The thought of spending the night here no longer seems so appealing. I look at Mili. She wants me to take her home.

Just before we reach the village I see a porcupine below a sand dune. I chase after it, but realise I cannot pick it up, so I kick it back to where it was.

Li Anmei and Tang Weiguo are waiting for me at the village gates. ‘The village head has just returned. He says he is very honoured that a Beijing journalist has come to write about Suoyang. He has invited the three of us to have dinner at his house tonight.’

To avoid walking through the desert at noon, I go to Li Anmei’s house the next morning and start work on a new story. Mili invites me to her uncle’s for lunch. In the afternoon she comes to my room to darn the tear in my trousers. As the sun rolls to the west I leave Qiaozi at last, and before nightfall reach Tashi, the nearest village to the Gorge of Ten Thousand Buddhas. Kang Ben from the Tashi cultural centre skims through Zhang Shengli’s introduction letter and asks me how many days I plan to stay. I tell him I will leave at dawn.

When I wake the next morning, my nose and throat are clogged with dust. I roll over and peer at the window. The sky outside is black. Squalls of sand blast through the poplar trees and billow the pigsty’s tarpaulin. The wind thunders like a thousand cantering horses as it throws branches and stones against walls and tears through the sky. Grains of sand blow through gaps in the window frame and cover the pillows and bedside table. I am glad I am not crossing the desert now.

I watch the storm for a while, then pull on my clothes and venture outside. The air is so thick with sand I cannot see the toilet hut, so I piss against the wall quickly and rush back inside. My face and neck are caked with sand. I heard this region is famous for its gales, but never imagined that when the wind carries dust, it can attack with the force of a hailstorm.

I decide to take the day off and stay indoors. The room smells of garlic and old socks, but is preferable to the storm outside. I jump into bed, light a cigarette, pull the quilt up to my chin and look over the passage I wrote yesterday.

We lean against the tree and embrace. I kiss her mouth and think of the day she lay beside me by the reservoir and touched my chin with her foot. In the sun her five toes were as clear as a slice of lemon.

’I’m not that special,’ she snorts when I stand back to look at her. Suddenly my feelings for her seem ridiculous. I turn round and look at the line of trees. I stare at one tree after another until I forget what I am looking at. .

Damn, this passage won’t do. I know I am writing about Xi Ping to purge her from my memory, but I must detach myself and put the pain in perspective. Why am I always trapped in the past?

Four days later, the wind still shows no sign of dropping. I take a nap and dream of Mili. I stroke her forehead and move my thigh between her legs. At sunrise I wake up seeing her face. The day I left Qiaozi, I gave her a Hong Kong bookmark printed with the words TAKE CARE. She was so happy her face went bright red. I must stop thinking about women. All emotional ties lead to pain.

Kang Ben’s room is decorated with two dusty goat horns and a poster of Zhou Enlai. He hands me a pile of newspapers to read and tells me his ambition is to write for the Gansu Daily. When I mention I have had stories published in literary magazines, he starts pestering me for advice. I tell him to keep his articles brief and concise and to avoid too much personal reflection. He shows me a report he wrote on the county secretary’s visit to the countryside. Apart from a brief description of the secretary’s genial smile, most of the article is a dull transcription of lectures he gave to peasants on the new agricultural reforms. I tell him there is no need to make the secretary’s visit sound like Deng Xiaoping’s tour of Sichuan. I finish a whole packet of cigarettes, and by the evening my head is pounding.

The next day I wake to the sound of the same raging storm. I have been here a week now. Kang Ben says this region has a hundred days a year of force seven gales. The locals claim there is just one wind: it lasts from spring until winter. I have stuffed wads of newspaper into the gaps of the window frame but the sand still gets between my teeth.

In the evening the power fails and my torch batteries run out. I put my notebook away and lie flat on the bed. The dark room feels like a large shell enclosing my beating heart. My body seems to have vanished. If I don’t leave soon I am afraid I will never escape. I must forget about the Gorge. It is only twenty kilometres away, but I would have to walk across open desert to reach it, I would never find my way in this wind. The Ten Thousand Buddhas obviously want to be left alone. There is a paved road to Dunhuang. I will set off for there tomorrow whether the wind stops or not. If there is road in front of me, I will follow it. I don’t mind where it goes, as long as it takes me forward. I must remember to return Zhang Shengli’s bicycle.

Kang Ben takes out a melon and cuts me a slice. It is delicious. The air is so dry here, melons will keep under the bed for up to six months.

On 7 April, I return to Anxi and catch a bus to Dunhuang. The town stands in a green oasis at the end of the Hexi Corridor. As I come out of the bus station I see a string of grey-brick houses and a crossroads like the one in Jiayuguan. A copse of young poplar trees outside a construction site is shrouded in ghostly dust. The shop windows along the street are crammed with scrolls of calligraphy, brass buddhas, porcelain figurines of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and posters of the Mogao murals. Garish signs painted on the grey walls read: Silk Road Hostel, Dunhuang Watchmenders, Flying Apsara Photo Studio, Moon Lake Dental Clinic, Singing Sand Snack Store. Only the shops at the intersection are busy. Occasionally a tall, brightly dressed foreigner passes through the blue sea of peasants. Centuries ago, this town was an important frontier post on the ancient Silk Road. Its streets were filled with envoys from the Middle East and Buddhist missionaries from India.