Ma Jian - Red Dust

Man’s greatest enemy is his fellow man, because only men take pleasure in inflicting pain. It is easier to battle against the forces of nature than to live among people. ‘When did you cross the border? How many were there of you? What is your assignment?’ The policeman launched into an interrogation. I asked to sit down. ‘You have seen my documents. The introduction letter got wet in the rain, it’s not my fault you can’t read it. Give me some food and water, or I will not say another word.’ The militiamen were still examining the photographs and tickets that had fallen from the pages of my notebook. The policeman ordered them to fetch ‘Old Beijing’, the village teacher.

After the teacher had deciphered the blurred characters of the introduction letter and exchanged a few words with me, he could tell I was not a spy. ‘I saw a lot of his type when I was at the county school,’ he told the policeman. ‘Long-haired artists. The larger the town, the longer the hair. This gentleman has had lunch with a Party secretary and the camera you found in his bag is worth three tractors.’ The militiamen looked startled at this news. The teacher told them to fry me some potatoes, while the policeman continued to thumb through my papers, trying to hide his embarrassment. I gobbled a bowl of rice and chatted with ‘Old Beijing’. He told me he had visited the capital once during the Cultural Revolution and had shaken the hand of a Red Guard soldier who had shaken hands with Chairman Mao. He said the militia head attended a meeting in the county town recently and came back with the policeman’s uniform, and that I should feel flattered, because he only wears it on special occasions.

The policeman tried to plot my route from the pile of wet bus tickets but found too many gaps. ‘My director warned us that spies carry used bus tickets to trick people into thinking they live here,’ he told the teacher. ‘None of the tickets add up. Look, there is a ticket to Menglong, but no ticket out.’

‘I trekked through the jungle to Menghai.’

‘Trekked? A real Beijing journalist would get a chauffeur-driven car from the county government.’ The policeman showed the teacher a plastic bag printed with the characters MADE IN HONG KONG. ‘Look, where do you suppose he got this from?’

The teacher was stumped. I told them it was a bag that had wrapped a pair of socks I had bought in Guangzhou, but they did not believe me. In the end, the policeman decided I should be taken to the county town’s Pubic Security Bureau.

They gave me a bed upstairs and told me not to leave the room. They said if I needed to piss I could do so out of the window.

The floors of the bamboo house creaked loudly. The only way to escape undetected was to jump out of the window. From the splash of my urine I could tell it was about a four-metre drop. I walked around the room trying to remember which floorboards creaked the most, then put my pack on, sat on the bed and closed my eyes.

I knew if they took me to the county town my life would be over. The police there would have been informed about my lecture in Kunming and my criminal record in Beijing. I would have been sent straight back to the capital and locked up for vagrancy and sedition.

I was woken by buzzing mosquitoes. It was past midnight. I could hear snoring next door. I shook my bed a little, the snores didn’t stop, so I carefully crept to the open window and eased myself down. I left the village and climbed the hill, not daring to turn my torch on. Soon I could hear the river again. When my hand touched a concrete bridge I switched on my torch and ran.

Half an hour later the batteries ran out and I was plunged into darkness again. Cold shivers ran down my spine. I was on a narrow path on a high mountain ridge. One false step and I would roll to my death. I could hear the wind rustle through treetops in the valley far below. I wished I had the eyes of a mouse and could see in the dark. I crouched down and began to crawl like a pig. If my hands touched mud I shuffled forwards, if they touched grass I shifted to the left. I groped like this for hours until I could go no further. At last I collapsed and sank my face into the ground. Even if the militiamen had run at me with their guns, I would still not have had the energy to move. I was no longer a traveller, I was a fugitive on the run.

At that very moment a light appeared in the darkness. It was neither a torch nor a candle, nor a glow-worm shaking in the breeze. It seemed to come from another realm. It rose from a stream and floated through the trees then stopped by some branches ten metres away and slowly dropped to my eye level. I shut my eyes and tried to compose myself. Suddenly I remembered a story my father told me as a child. One night, when my grandfather had lost his way in a field of sorghum, a ball of fire appeared before him and guided him back home.

I opened my eyes and stood up. He is here. My grandfather who died in a communist jail before I was born has come to my rescue. I walked forward and the ball of fire followed me through the branches, guiding my way for twenty kilometres until the sky turned white.

The driver grumbles, ‘Looks like we’re stuck here for the night,’ then swings his legs onto the dashboard and falls into a doze. We should have reached Dali two hours ago. The passengers start fighting for sleeping space. I cannot sleep while it is still light, so I wander outside and count the stationary vehicles. Seventy trucks, three tractors. If that boulder isn’t moved, there will be even more tomorrow. Thank goodness I have a seat. I climb back onto the bus, sit down, tug the raincoat from my bag and drape it over my head.

I am woken in the morning by rowdy peasants banging on the bus trying to sell us their boiled eggs. At noon they are joined by people selling home-made ice lollies, biscuits and sugared prunes. One man turns up with a wok and starts selling pancakes and fried rice. The road inspector arrives in the afternoon. He has a gammy leg. He clambers onto our bus and says, ‘I’ll call the roadworkers out, but it’ll take them a day to get here,’ then he takes a cigarette from the driver and hobbles away again. Suddenly it occurs to me that even if the boulder were shifted no one would be able to move because the trucks are double-parked. I feel tempted to take my bag and walk, but decide it would be a waste of a four-yuan ticket. So I stroll outside instead, buy a bag of boiled eggs and sit under a tree with my notebook.

Last week, when I arrived in Baoshan after my narrow escape from the police, I sought refuge with Li Chengyuan, the editor of Peacock magazine. I was afraid to venture outside in case the local police had been notified about me. So I stayed indoors most of the time, writing letters. I sent Wang Ping a poem and a large butterfly. I wanted to ask her to write back to me, but was still not sure where I would be next month. I sent Lingling my notes on the Wa tribe, and an embroidered bag I bought last month in Xuelin market.

Xuelin was a small Wa village in the Awa mountains, close to the Burmese border. On market day, Wa peasants came down from the mountains to sell their meagre wares. Their skin was dark and coarse, and brought to mind their mythical ancestors — the mud creatures. According to legend, two sexless creatures walked through a garden and heard a snake tell them to pick fruit from a tree. The first creature ate two and the fruit became breasts, the second ate one and the fruit became an Adam’s apple.

Although the Wa women had torn clothes and callused hands they found ways to express their femininity. Some had woven black skirts and embroidered the hems with yellow and red flowers. One old woman wore a bicycle chain as a necklace. Girls who could not afford bracelets wore rubber bands instead, and rouged their cheeks with spit and a rub of cheap red paper. Women who owned no scarves wrapped shirts around their heads and decorated them with sprigs of wild flowers. Traditionally, Wa women spent their time making life beautiful while the men were busy severing heads. A nearby village once stole a bull from Xuelin, and in the fight that ensued four hundred people were decapitated.