Ma Jian - Red Dust

‘Are those boys with you?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll come and join you then.’

‘All right. How many people did you come with?’

‘Five. And you?’

‘Three. The girl in white is my sister. .’

The room is like a bathhouse, everyone is streaming with sweat. The waltz comes to an end, but I don’t want to let go of her. I squeeze her clammy hand all the way back to her seat. Deng Lijun sings, ‘When you walked by and looked at me a flame burned through my heart. They say that where there is fire there will be love, I hope they are not wrong. .’

Everyone is parched when we leave the ballroom, so we go to a small restaurant for a drink. It’s called the Mousehole. The floor is littered with butts and snail shells but there are two electric fans on the wall so at least it is cooler than the ballroom.

We order beer, four colas and some Chengdu snacks: shoulder-pole noodles, osmanthus dumplings, and hot-sour tripe. ‘Try some of our Sichuan beer! Cheers!’ He Liu removes his sunglasses at last and raises his glass. He is smooth-faced and thin as a rake. He types speeches in the army camp by day, and in the evenings writes poetry and studies aesthetics. Ding Xue is on my left waving a fan, her right hand perspiring in my palm.

The sweat pours as we swig cold beer and slurp the oily noodles. Moths flit through the steam and crash into the naked light bulbs. ‘That poet you invited from Beijing, he can fool the students but he can’t fool me. That’s not poetry, that’s shit!’

Yang Ming pulls a face. ‘No one invited you to the reading. Waiter! Get me some chopsticks!’

‘All that songbird, rowing boat, moonlight, fountain, sunset pseudo-innocent crap! Stop anyone on the streets of Chengdu and they can write better poetry than that.’ He Liu’s stool squeaks as he rocks back and forth.

I keep quiet. He obviously has a grudge against Beijing poets. In his flat this afternoon he said how depressed he was at not being able to move to the capital. He put on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while I examined his shelves. The books were identical to the ones you see on the shelves of Beijing intellectuals, but instead of the usual Beethoven bust and bottle of French brandy there were Buddhist figurines from Anhui and Wa bracelets from Yunnan. Despite this show of fine taste, he kept humming ‘Every sha-la-la, every wo-o wo-o’. It drove me insane. Wang Ping sings that song so much better. Perhaps she is singing it now at the Hangzhou Hotel. She too has no idea that today is my birthday.

Du Chuan, on my right, has even longer hair than mine. Everyone looks round and stares at him as they enter the restaurant. I have not seen his paintings yet. He chain-smokes throughout the meal, resting the cigarette on the table before he picks up his chopsticks. I imagine his pillow cases at home are riddled with cigarette burns.

‘How is the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution affecting Chengdu?’ I ask.

‘Two painters have been arrested, both friends of mine.’

‘Have they been sentenced yet?’

‘Qu Wei has. Talented man, but a complete sex maniac of course. Had girls streaming in and out of his room all day. He went to Guangzhou to buy some cheap cigarettes but came back with nine packs of playing cards printed with pictures of naked women. He sold one pack for fifty yuan, and the man who bought it sold the cards on individually. By the time Qu Wei was arrested thirty people had seen the cards. The police retrieved them all except for two that were sold to a long-distance driver. Four officers were sent to Xinjiang but they never found him. If they had retrieved the full pack he might have got away with two years.’

‘What did he get then?’

‘Seven. It wasn’t just the cards though. He was also accused of holding private parties, dancing cheek to cheek, watching obscene videos, performing foreign sexual acts and perverting an innocent policewoman.’ Everyone laughs.

‘I wouldn’t mind perverting a policewoman,’ He Liu says. He pops a clove of garlic in his mouth and slowly spits out the skin.

‘There was a policewoman at the dance just now. She lives a few doors down from me on Huaishu Lane.’ You can never tell who Ding Xue is looking at when she speaks. When I introduced her to my friends outside the ballroom they all started babbling away in Sichuanese about the friends they had in common, which spoiled the romance a little.

‘The other guy printed photographs of a naked woman from negatives his father had hidden for twenty years. He sold the prints for two mao each, but only made a couple of yuan before the police put him in handcuffs.’

‘You wouldn’t go to prison for that in Beijing. At the most they would throw you out of the work unit.’

‘He won’t go to jail. His family are Overseas Chinese who moved back here from South-East Asia. He’ll get off with a few years in a labour reform camp.’

‘The woman was probably his father’s Thai mistress. By the way, can you get colour film developed in Chengdu?’

‘Yes, but if there are pictures of naked women you need to be an art teacher and show written permission from the college.’

The plates are empty. I finish the pieces of fat Ding Xue has left in her bowl.

Yang Ming is discussing contraband cigarettes. ‘We’re planning to go to Guangzhou and buy a hundred packs. Wu Jian is thinking of giving up his job. You know what they say — buy one pack and you’re a fool, buy ten and you’re smart, buy a hundred and you’re rich, buy a thousand and you’re behind bars!’

‘I’ll join you,’ Du Chuan says. ‘Benson and Hedges cost five yuan there and you can sell them here for eight.’

‘I won’t let you go,’ says Xiao Juan, replenishing his cup of tea. ‘The hotels are full of loose women.’

‘You shouldn’t fawn on him like that, Xiao Juan,’ Yang Ming snaps. ‘He should be pouring tea for you. In foreign countries, men open doors for women and help them off with their coats.’

‘If I helped you off with your clothes you’d scream!’

Yang Ming leans over and slaps Du Chuan’s hand. ‘Behave yourself! Listen now, Ma Jian has been travelling for months and he needs some money. Can you find him some work?’

‘I’ll do anything,’ I add.

‘Du Chuan does sketches for a construction company. They pay him a fortune. He’s nearly a millionaire.’

‘Rubbish!’ he says. I glance at his wrist and notice a gold Swiss watch. ‘Some friends are producing an animation of journey to the West. I can make enquiries for you, but I will need samples of your work. Come to my flat tomorrow and I’ll lend you some paper and pens.’

‘Have you been to Guangzhou?’ I ask Ding Xue.

‘No, but I’m planning to go to Shenzhen. You can see Hong Kong television there, and foreign films. Our dramatist lived there for six months and came back with a foreign motorbike and a colour television.’

‘Had he given up his job?’

‘No, he’d just spent three years in prison. No one would employ him when he got out so he went to Shenzhen to try his luck.’

‘What was he in for?’

‘Listening to enemy radio. He shouted "Down with the Communist Party!" in our backyard and was overheard by some neighbours doing their morning exercises.’

‘He’d probably been hitting the bottle.’ He Liu fiddles with the arm of his sunglasses.

‘The police interrogated me.’

‘So you were shouting too?’ Du Chuan blows a puff of smoke into the air.

‘No, but my window happened to be open. The neighbours reported me. I was washing my hair at the time and didn’t hear a thing.’

‘What would they have done if you had?’

‘Not much, just taken me to the Bureau and rectified my thinking. But because of him the entire company had to attend political study classes every day for a month, and no one was allowed a day off.’