Ma Jian - Red Dust

I skirt around his truck. When it falls out of sight, I stop and collapse on the ground.

I shine the torch onto my watch. Four in the morning. Two hours to go before dawn. I lie down to sleep, but am woken before long by the wind.

In the moonlight the desert looks cold and empty. The only noise I hear is the ringing in my ears. For a moment it feels like a dream. Sometimes I dream of cantering under the moon on the hooves of a deer, my body as light as paper. But my bones feel pinned to the ground now and as heavy as death. My lips and throat are painfully dry. I dare not turn on my torch for fear of attracting wolves. As long as I keep still, I can melt into the darkness. When the cold becomes unbearable I jump up, stamp my feet and see the morning light tear the sky from the earth. Then I lie down and fall into a doze.

I am woken again by the faint rumble of a truck. I roll over, sit up, and look west to where the noise is coming from. From yesterday’s experience I know that the truck could be a hundred kilometres away. The sky is clear now. The low horizon makes me feel very tall. The Aierjin mountains look less severe than they did yesterday from Akesai. The lines are softer, the slopes are bathed in a blue-green light and the peaks are rinsed in gold.

I plant myself in the middle of the track. The dawn air is moist, but my throat is still dry. There is no sign of the driver or the truck I saw last night.

A sheet of yellow dust lifts from the horizon, the rumble gets closer and closer. An hour later, the cloud of dust has grown. It looks like a wave of a stormy sea pushing the truck forward. I stand up, glance at the track and realise it is wide enough for the truck to drive right past me. I will just have to hope for the best.

I wave my hands in the air. The truck passes. I close my eyes.

Then it stops, and a voice shouts, ‘Want to fucking kill yourself, do you?’

I look up. There is sand everywhere. I grope my way to the front seat and cry, ‘Help me out, brother, please! I need to go to Tuanjie. Thank you, thank you.’ I climb into the back and sit on a heap of cement bags.

He pushes on the accelerator and we drive off. I look at the shaking desert and receding mountain range, and just as it did yesterday when I first saw Sugan, my heart begins to soar.

Detonated mountains, untouched places Crawl with dry veins. As summer’s phosphorescence drifts to its end Another kind heart squeezes from the Same simple spawn. The traveller’s spine trembles. .

I read through my poem. It is very long and still needs a lot of work. I wrote it in Tuanjie after two days of solid sleep — it felt like pulling out a dirty rag that had lodged at the back of my throat. I can’t make any changes to it now though. I will send it off as it is and see if I can get some money for it. My bed is strewn with letters ready to be posted. I have written a long letter to Nannan which her mother will no doubt keep from her. The letter to Lingling at Guangzhou Press contains grains of desert sand, and the one to Wang Ping pressed flowers from the Kazak pastures. In my letter to Yang Ming, the editor of Chengdu’s Star magazine, I have enclosed a short story called ‘Escarpment’.

My letter to Li Tao is five pages long. I tell him my money is running out, and ask him to find a publisher for my poem. ‘Send my fee to Yang Ming. I might pass through Chengdu in a few months. First, though, I will travel to Tibet. I want to cleanse myself in pure mountain air and undergo the privations of spiritual pilgrimage.’

I recount my thoughts after leaving the desert. ‘Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fears, but this is not real freedom. You need money to be free.’ Then I write:

Golmud is a grey dusty town on the Qinghai plateau that serves as a staging post for Tibet. The railway from Xining ends here, and migrant workers pour off the trains and wander the streets with desperation in their eyes, like the gold-diggers in American westerns. Trucks line the streets. As soon as a truck arrives back from Lhasa, yak skins and frozen meat are unloaded from its back and replaced with Chinese carpets and tinned vegetables. Tibetans with knives dangling from their waists stride through the traffic as though they were roving the empty plains.

In the long-distance bus station, passengers sit crammed in the morning bus waiting for it to leave for Tibet. Some lean out of the windows to buy dumplings and hard-boiled eggs. Others jump off to search for the driver, go for a piss, or look for a piece of string to tie up their broken bags. Late passengers push through the crowded forecourt, dodging pickpockets, horse-and-carts and puddles of urine. I have spent the last week working at this station, suffocating in the stench of dung and petrol, lugging bags around for just one yuan a day.

I have also written to Li Anmei to thank her for her parents’ hospitality. I spent a month with them in Tuanjie, resting and writing, and making excursions into the surrounding pastures. I tell her:

A family of Kazak nomads put me up in their tent for a few days. I ate fresh yoghurt and learned to ride a horse bareback. The wife spent all day cooking while the husband sat watching his sheep. I lost all sense of time. They told me the government want them to give up their nomadic life and move to a concrete house in the city.

It is nice to spend a day writing letters. It feels like travelling through space.

It is June. I am sitting on my bed in a farmers’ hostel in the dingy outskirts of Golmud. Smells of oil, diesel and horse urine waft through the open window. The dormitory’s broken door rattles in the wind and two hens peek their heads through the crack in the wood. I get up to fetch some hot water and catch sight of my reflection in the mirror above the washstand. I look hideous — worse even than the day I arrived in Tuanjie. My skin is peeling, and the new layer underneath is still pale and raw. My hair and beard are excessively long. It is time I had a haircut. As I stare at the gruesome apparition I suddenly forget who I am looking at. That frowning face looks nothing like me. I realise my standards have been slipping. Last night I felt no compunction about squeezing my fleas in front of the Tianjin tiger-skin trader. I even got used to him spitting sunflower-seed husks onto the floor. I have taken to squatting on street corners munching raw tomatoes and ambling through town with my trouser legs rolled up, just like all the other peasants drifting through China trying to pick up work.

Before dark I stroll to the kebab stalls outside the workers’ club in the centre of town. The Muslim boys in white caps shout at each other through clouds of charcoal smoke. In a corner behind them I see a man cutting hair, so I walk over and ask how much he charges. He says two and a half mao, no wash. I ask him where he is from, and he says Kaifeng, Henan Province. I remember reading about the Israelites who settled there generations ago, and look at him with keener interest. I ask how much he makes in a day, he says nine, ten yuan on average. I could do that, I think to myself. So I hurry to a department store and buy clippers, scissors, a comb and a metre of white cloth. Then I position myself by a lamp outside a video hall and cry, ‘Haircuts, two mao a go!’

A Hong Kong action film called Beyond Forbearance is playing on the video machine inside. Men and children who cannot afford tickets gather under the speakers by the door to listen to the shrieks and punches. I spot a man with shoulder-length hair and ask if he wants a cut.