Ma Jian - Red Dust

As we say goodbye outside the restaurant I offer to walk Ding Xue home. Yang Ming looks cross and says, ‘Make sure you return to the university in time, the gates shut at eleven. And don’t forget, you have those sketches to do tomorrow.’ Because she has come dancing tonight, there is a lump of amber dangling from her neck on a length of black cord.

I walk with Ding Xue to a large tree, we lean against it and embrace. I kiss her lips. People walk towards us, so we move on. Soon she says, ‘This is Huaishu Lane, my home is over there.’ And I say, ‘Let’s walk a little further, then.’ In a lampless part of the road I pin her against the wall and kiss her neck, her face. Her legs shake, her body slackens. I hear someone coming, so I slip my arm around her waist and we walk on. ‘What if the neighbours see me?’ she says, bowing her head. We approach a street lamp and see people sitting on straw mats playing cards. From the back they look like hemp sacks. Old women sit in silent doorways, waving their paper fans. We turn into a dark lane. I hold her and brush my hand down her breast. She pushes me away, then pulls me back and kisses me. A voice shouts, ‘Filthy buggers! Haven’t you homes to go to?’ We walk on and come to a busy road. Car horns shriek through the night sky. ‘Let’s find somewhere quiet,’ I say. She takes my hand and leads me back through the long dark lanes until we reach the crowded forecourt of the train station. An announcement crackles over the speaker, ‘If anyone has lost their child. .’

We cross the road and sneak into a shady park. It is quieter here, people are sleeping on benches waiting for the morning trains. We crawl into the bushes and sit on a rock. I lift Ding Xue onto my lap and kiss her breasts. Someone wheels a suitcase past and she shrinks back in fear. I whisper, ‘Don’t worry, no one can see us,’ and stretch my hand up her damp red skirt. She strokes my hair and blows into my ears. The roar of my blood drowns the noise of the traffic. I let go of myself and pound into her. The lamps flicker, everything clenches, and for a moment I forget the litter, the smell of urine, the mosquitoes. We drip into each other and sink to the ground and I say things to her again and again.

‘I’ll go and get some fizzy orange,’ she says, standing up. I help buckle her sandals, then get to my feet, zip up my jeans and stare at the station lights through the branches. I would love to lie in bed now and have a cigarette. I smooth my hair back and sit down again. ‘If anyone has lost a child, they should report at once to the attendant in the main waiting room. The night train to Beijing is about to depart from platform three. .’

Ding Xue returns and jumps onto my lap. One of us has bad breath, but soon our mouths taste only of fizzy orange. We rub tiger lotion onto each other’s mosquito bites, then lie down and close our eyes.

‘Get up! Show us your documents!’ I look up and see four torches shining on my face.

‘I missed my train,’ I say. ‘This is my girlfriend, I am just off to change my ticket.’ When Ding Xue is escorted away, they unzip my trousers and pull out my penis. ‘What’s that girl’s name, where did you meet her?’ I answer their questions and say, ‘If you don’t believe me, go and check with the photographers’ union tomorrow. They are my host organisation for this trip.’

‘You’re no photographer. Look at the state of you! You’ve just travelled here to fool with our women.’

When I see their red armbands and realise they are just a division of the people’s patrol, I breathe a sigh of relief. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve made a fool of myself. Don’t be angry. Here — have a cigarette. Do you have the time on you? That’s a nice watch, I had one like that once. My dad pinched it of course. .’ The others bring Ding Xue back and say it is time to go. As we watch them march out of the park gates Ding Xue says, ‘Don’t worry, I know the officer in charge.’

We leave the park and stand on the pavement, waiting to cross the road. ‘If they do make enquiries though I will be in terrible trouble,’ she says, scraping her sandals across the lip of the curb as the petrol fumes gush into her face.

‘Why is that?’ I look at the traffic, still waiting for a chance to cross. A road sprinkler drives by and drenches us in water from the waist down.

‘Because my husband works for the Public Security Bureau.’ A gap opens in the traffic and she dashes across the road.

I look at my watch. It’s three thirty. I wish I could shut my eyes and sleep inside my dreams.

A month later, having earned two hundred yuan for painting twenty-four cartoon characters, I post my Tibetan knife to Li Tao, leave Chengdu and head south to Leshan to see the largest carved buddha in the world. He is a mountain of stone, seventy-one metres high with trees sprouting from his ears and tourists clambering up between his toes to pose for souvenir photographs. The buddha looks down impassively at the white river below his feet, as he has done for the last thousand years.

On 10 September I visit Wulong Temple then proceed to Emei town. The two men sharing my hostel room are itinerant peddlers of plastic running shoes. They examine a photograph of Deng Xiaoping and argue about whether the cigarette in his mouth is a Panda or a Double Happiness. I lean over and read the caption. ‘On 2 August, China and Great Britain agreed that Hong Kong shall return to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997. The draft accord stipulates that laws presently in force in Hong Kong will remain basically unchanged for the next fifty years.’ Mrs Thatcher’s face scowls in the left-hand corner of the photograph.

‘Deng Xiaoping employs a fellow Sichuanese to roll his cigarettes,’ I tell them. ‘He won’t smoke anything else.’

‘Will we be able to visit Hong Kong after 1997, like we can visit Shenzhen now? Will Hong Kong and Shenzhen merge into one huge city?’

‘That depends how long your old compatriot lives.’

On the 11th I begin my ascent of Emei, the highest of China’s four Buddhist mountains. It is believed that the Indian saint, Puxian, travelled here in the sixth century on the back of a white elephant to perform miracles and expound on Buddhist law. I visit the Temple of Eternity in the foothills and see the sixty-two-ton bronze statue of Puxian seated cross-legged on a white elephant. In my dreams that night, the white elephant stomps through a busy market street. Crowds stumble back in terror and watermelons roll to the ground.

For two days I scale the stone steps of the narrow mountain path. At noon on the third day, I look down from the Golden Summit and see three silver rivers snaking through the hills of Sichuan and a line of snowcaps piercing the sky in the west. The landscape looks primordial and untouched. It is hard to believe that Sichuan is the most densely populated province of China, and home to a hundred million people.

Down from the mountain, I walk east and see the hanging coffins of the Bo tribe on a cliff of the River Min. The coffins are suspended on wooden plinths halfway up the rock face, and are the only legacy of the vanished Bo. Historians are not sure how the Bo placed their coffins there, or why the tribe vanished so mysteriously. But local legend has it that when imperial troops invaded the area in the seventeenth century to quash restive tribes, the Bo retreated to the rim of the cliff and hurled themselves off the edge.

Further east, at Neijiang, ‘City of Sweets’, I buy half a jin of sugared plums and go to munch them by the banks of the River Tuo. A small crowd gathers beside me to watch an old man swallow a sword. When the blades bulge through the skin of his neck everyone claps, and a little boy of eight or nine holds a plate out and asks for money. The old man announces his next act is called ‘Drawing Blood’. He raises his sword in the air and with one strike hacks right into the little boy’s neck. The boy faints in a pool of blood. The old man panics for a second, then begs the crowd to donate some money for the emergency hospital treatment. I give him ten yuan. When I squeeze free from the crowd I discover someone has stolen my sunglasses.