Ma Jian - Red Dust

‘S-sit down, please. I’ll light the stove. Is it still r-raining outside?’ Jiefang throws off his bedcover and picks up a box of matches.

‘I’m not cold. Please sit down. You seem to be in fine health.’ He looks perfectly normal to me.

‘I’m much b-b-better. Came here in September and the m-medicine worked at once. Went home, but my w-wife didn’t w-want me, wouldn’t even let me see the ch-children. Went back to my f-factory, but they wouldn’t take me. They gave me some money and told me to go away. No hostel would have m-me, so I had to come b-back here in the end.’

‘We wrote to his work unit to say he was not contagious, but they wouldn’t listen. The fear runs too deep.’

‘How do you spend your time?’ Jiefang looks about thirty.

‘My hands still work, so I am needed on the fields. My boys? One’s n-nine, the other’s five. No, they have n-never v-visited me.’ His lips continue to quiver long after he finishes speaking.

A woman hobbles in on crutches. Her clothes are filthy. She is wearing an army cap. Her twisted mouth is half-open. A blind man with a haggard face follows behind her. They are joined by ten or more patients. Some have lost a hand, an ear, a nose, but most of them can walk and their skins seem quite healthy. The room is too crowded now, so I suggest we move on.

I open the next door and see an old woman crouched by the stove. Tufts of hair rise from her bald head like clumps of weed. Her eyes follow me as I enter the room, then return to the chillies behind the door. Another woman is asleep in the bed. All I can see is a patch of skin — a face or shoulder — peeping out between the blanket and the pillow. Her breathing is loud and chesty. An old flannel and a card printed with the words DOUBLE HAPPINESS hangs from the hook of a grey mosquito net. The smoke-stained wall behind the stove is pasted with pill-bottle labels. It looks like fungus sprouting on rotten wood.

‘The lady in bed is fifty-one. She suffers from gastric bleeding and can’t speak any more.’

The next room is a little brighter, the walls are lined with newspaper. An old man with white hair sits on the edge of his bed watching flies dart about. His face is gaunt and twisted. Streams of saliva dribble from the corners of his mouth and run down his padded jacket like rail tracks. He clutches the bedside table with his two remaining fingers. There is a newspaper on the table, an apple and a muddy pair of gloves.

‘Where are you from?’ he splutters with great effort.

‘Comrade Ma is a journalist from Guiyang, Old Wu. He has come to investigate our situation and will report back to the higher authorities. Old Wu has been with us for thirty years. He studied at Kunming Normal College and worked for the local government. Everyone here comes to him when they need to write letters.’ The director obviously gets on well with his patients.

‘We only receive twelve yuan a month, but prices keep going up, we can hardly afford to feed ourselves.’ Old Wu dribbles, tapping his knuckles on the newspaper. ‘We have written to the public health department three times asking for help but they still haven’t replied.’

The other patients start chipping in.

‘The reform policies have improved people’s lives, but we still live on maize gruel here. In Hezhang Hospital they have televisions in every room.’

‘The county sent us some hats this year, but we need soap and new farm tools.’

‘And a television.’

‘We can never go shopping.’

‘Me? I was nine when I arrived. I’ve only been home once.’

‘This is our little orphan. His family lives in Sichuan. He went home in 1968 but the villagers beat him up. He hid in the bushes by day and walked back to us under the cover of darkness.’

‘We have four hens, two of them lay eggs.’

‘Comrade Journalist, please send our message to the government. I am a Party member, I led a production brigade. .’

I ask to take a picture of them outside and suddenly they freeze.

The director pulls me aside and whispers, ‘They never take photographs of each other. Haven’t you noticed there are no mirrors in the camp?’

‘Comrade Journalist has shown us respect. We should allow him to take our photograph.’ Old Wu waves his hand and everyone returns to their rooms to change into their best clothes. Old Wu has no feet but he sticks his leg stumps into a pair of old leather shoes, leans on the table and pushes himself up.

It is still drizzling outside. A wet hen scuttles out of the chicken coop. Everyone helps carry the old woman out of her room and comb her hair in place. Thirty disfigured faces stare into my lens, their eyes crying out for help. The women brush their hair back. The director holds an umbrella over me, my hands are shaking. I don’t know what I can do for these people.

Back in his office, the director tells me that without the vegetable plots and three apple trees the patients would starve. ‘No one could survive on what the government gives.’

‘But they are crippled. How can they work on the land?’

‘Two of them still have use of their hands and the staff help out with basic necessities.’

‘The old woman they carried out is not well, is she?’

‘She’s been ill for ten years. She has never had leprosy though. Her boyfriend caught the disease in the 1960s. They came here together, and had their wedding in the camp. He died four years later and she has been here ever since.’

‘How many patients were here at the height?’

‘Over a hundred, I think. They used to have dances on National Day. But conditions are terrible now. We never have enough medicine. The doctor’s salary is just a hundred yuan a year, no bonuses. The local peasants assume the staff are contagious and refuse to come near us.’

‘Can’t you get a transfer?’

‘Probably, but I have grown attached to the patients, I can’t just abandon them. Last year they caught a wild bird, made a bamboo cage and gave it to me for Spring Festival. They know it is dangerous to make gifts of food, so they keep all the apples for themselves.’

In the morning I return to the red path. The sky is clear now, but the air around the wall-less camp looks cold and stiff. I glance back at the white building rising from the neat vegetable plots. It looks like an empty shell hovering above the ground. If it hadn’t rained yesterday, I would have walked straight past.

It is the middle of April but the rivers are still ice cold. Whenever I wade across one, my legs go numb for hours. I climb two mountains a day and at last reach Shimenkan village, drained and exhausted. The village head gives me a friendly welcome and offers me a bed in the committee house.

‘This house was built by English missionaries. It used to be a church.’ He was sent here by the local government to work on poverty relief.

In the evening I open my map. I am at the north-western tip of Guizhou Province, near the borders of Yunnan and Sichuan. I close my eyes and picture the mountains I have crossed during the last month, and wonder how Mr Bagley and his wife managed to make it here all those years ago. They came in 1902 to build a school and a church for the villagers, and stayed until Mr Bagley’s death from typhoid thirteen years later. I visited the school this afternoon. The children sleep on wooden planks now. When they are hungry they take a potato from a cloth sack and cook it on a fire of dried leaves.

The next morning I visit the cemetery and see the open graves of Bagley and a fellow missionary who was murdered by local tribes. The smashed tombstones lie scattered on the grass. You can still see the English letters and Chinese characters of the inscriptions. After the men were buried, the villagers continually unearthed their graves looking for treasure. In the end they took everything, even the bones.