Ma Jian - Red Dust

She glances at the director, my tape recorder, notebook, then wipes her dripping nose.

‘Where did you buy the drugs?’ I look into her vacant eyes.

‘It’s easy if you know the right people. I used to smoke three times a day when I had the money. Even when I was hard up I managed one fix a day. But I always ate fresh fruit afterwards — not like those layabouts. They wouldn’t even stretch to a bottle of orange pop. I would like to give up but. .’

There is a busy crossroads outside. Noises of car horns and voices merge into one sound. A bright beam of sunlight pierces through the open window.

I come out of the centre and stride through the streets relishing my freedom of movement. As the sun sinks below the clock tower, the sea of blue pedestrians drifts into the grey dusk. Perhaps an opium smoker is hidden in their midst, waiting to be caught by the police and thrown under the filthy quilts. I always associated drugs with the Opium War, imperial decadence and foreign exploitation. What place do they have in today’s society? Perhaps when people have no ideals, money can only buy oblivion, not freedom.

Society’s values have changed a lot in the short time since I left Beijing. Fang Li believes that eating fruit after smoking opium puts her a cut above the layabouts. I want to write a story about the people who live above ground and the souls who writhe below. I sit down at a Muslim restaurant and pull out the notes I copied from Fang Li’s records. ‘Son: 6. Mother: 52, senile. Father: 55, history professor at Northwest University. .’ I must talk to her again when she is released.

A beggar approaches, shaking an empty cap. I push the leftovers of my mutton soup towards him and leave the restaurant.

When the crowds and buses have disappeared, the weight of the night falls on the empty streets. The city walls look worn and defeated. The ground is so heavy I feel as though I am walking into my grave.

The next morning I am woken by the noise of footsteps thudding along the corridor outside. Yao Lu gets up and goes to fetch a thermos of hot water while I fold our camp beds and sweep the floor. When the canteen bell rings for breakfast, I go down and return to the office with half a jin of dumplings and a copy of the Xian Daily. Yao Lu hands me a cup of green tea and starts reading the newspaper. ‘Says here a man put an advert in the Beijing papers announcing he was opening a modelling agency. He offered the girls a salary of forty yuan a month, and received 170 applications. He had permission from the Department of Culture. This is incredible. The first fashion models in the history of communist China!’

‘Last year I was arrested for sketching a model in a life class. It is amazing what a free economy can do to society.’ I arrange my pens and prepare to draw my twentieth illustration.

Yao Lu disappears for a few minutes and returns with a smile on his face. ‘The leaders have approved your first ten illustrations. Looks like you have some more travelling money.’

‘We must go for a drink tonight,’ I smile. ‘I read the book of legends you lent me. I like the one about tombstones. It has given me an idea for a story.’

‘Don’t start writing historical novels, please!’

‘No. Or imitating Marquez!’

‘Reality is just a loop in a greater chain.’ He opens a drawer. ‘Look at these manuscripts I get sent. The stories are shallow, they have no context. . By the way, I gave your film to a friend who runs a photo lab. It should be ready in a couple of days.’

Just as we finish for the day, the telephone rings. It’s Yang Qing. ‘How were the addicts? Did they provide you with any literary inspiration?’

‘I didn’t realise there would be so many.’

‘I have some news for you. The protracted battle against reactionary forces has finally reached completion.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution is over. You can go back to Beijing!’

‘No, I don’t think I will risk it. As soon as the Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalisation finished this one followed hot on its heels.’

‘It’s up to you. Anyway, we’ve seen the figures.’

‘How many arrests?’

‘Over a million, and twenty-four thousand executions. Don’t tell anyone though until you see it in the papers.’

I put the phone down and repeat what I have heard to Yao Lu. ‘If I had stayed in Beijing I might be in my grave by now. We really must go drinking tonight, Yao Lu. It won’t be long before they let you off the hook too.’

‘I will take you to Old Sun the Daoist. He will read your fortune and give you an amulet to protect you on your travels.’

‘Don’t worry about me, Yao Lu. I never come to harm. I just hate to think of you spending the rest of your life marooned in this dead city.’

A cold wind sweeps through the village of Xinjie. I escape into a small restaurant and order a bowl of Mongolian milk tea and three steamed rolls. Three young men are huddled by the stove, smoking hemp rolled in newspaper. The smells of coal smoke and burnt ink sting my eyes.

I pull out a red pen, open my map and think back on the route I have taken over the last month. From Xian I walked west to Qianling. From a distance, the three mounds of Empress Wu Zetian’s tomb resembled the curves of a reclining woman. At the peak of one mound I had a piss and the wind blew it straight back into my face.

At Baoji I stopped and saw an exhibition of ancient bronze vessels dug up in fields nearby. Outside the museum, a man stood handcuffed to a tree. A woman in an angora sweater struck a match and held it to the cigarette in his mouth.

On the train to Tianshui, the conductor discovered that twenty peasants in our carriage were travelling without tickets. When he went to lunch he asked me to guard the doors. I turned to the most genial-looking man and asked why he could not afford a ticket. He said, ‘I sold five hundred jin of maize to the state this year and made three hundred yuan. But by the time I’d paid the agricultural tax, farmer’s board tax, security tax and the telephone bills, I was seventy yuan in the red.’

‘Why have a telephone if you’re so hard up?’

‘I’ve never touched a telephone in my life. But the village head wanted one in his home so we all had to cough up twenty yuan.’

I calculated his annual earnings would scarcely buy three puffs of opium so I opened the door and let him go.

From Tianshui I hitched a ride to the Maijishan Grottoes. The entrance ticket had a one-yuan supplementary charge for the road construction tax.

On 20 November I reached Lanzhou and stayed with Yao Lu’s friend at the university. The next morning he gave me a thick jumper and I took a bus through the Liupan mountains to Guyuan in Ningxia Province. When Mao Zedong led the communists through those mountains in 1935, on the Long March to escape Guomindang persecution, he wrote: ‘Heaven is high, the clouds are thin/ We watch the wild geese vanish to the south/ If we cannot reach the Great Wall we are not true men/ On my fingers I count the twenty thousand li we have travelled so far. .’ A nice poem, but what purpose did his crusade serve? This region has suffered from famines every year since the 1960s. Families own one pair of trousers between them, and the men who share them nag their wives to get pregnant so they can sell the babies for money.

It snowed all the way to the Xumishan Caves. A small copse of pine trees rose from the bare summit. I bowed to the twenty-metre-high seated buddha, ate some dumplings in the temple restaurant, then hitched a ride north. The road was lined with Hui traders, all wearing their distinctive white caps. Whether they were busy weighing peanuts or arguing with their customers, they would always look up when a truck passed, so I saw a continual stream of faces.