Beijing Coma (104 page)

The doctor who came forward looked as though he’d just crawled out of a river of blood. His gloves and face mask were bright red. ‘Lie him flat on the stretcher and wait here!’ he shouted. ‘There’s no more room in the wards.’

The bulldozer charges into the building like an army tank, making our walls shake and our floor-beams tremble and crack. It moves back, its tracks screeching over shattered glass and planks of wood. Beside it, a digger is shovelling broken tiles and metal frames into an open-back truck. The bulldozer rams again and our walls shudder. Unable to take the strain any longer, our balcony suddenly gives way and crashes to the ground, taking our outer wall and the sparrow’s nest with it. As the bricks and cement hurtle down, I can hear the Bodhisattva figurine shatter into tiny pieces. Petrol fumes from the machines outside pour into the room together with the stench from broken sewer pipes. A heavy-goods vehicle rumbles past in the distance.

My mother roars like an angry tigress. ‘This is my home! You fascists! If you come any nearer, I will jump!’

‘Go on, jump then, old lady! Then the bulldozer can scoop you up from the ground and take you away. It will save us a lot of trouble!’ This labourer’s voice is very familiar. It’s the drifter. I’m sure it’s him. Mao Da mentioned he was working on construction sites now. I wonder why he still hasn’t gone back to Sichuan.

‘Get back to your work. The sun is almost up. Don’t waste your time pestering that madwoman. You two, go and lean that flight of stairs against her front door, so that she’ll be able to climb down if she wants to.’

‘What does “fascist” mean?’

‘Are you stupid?
Fa-shi-si
: It means “punish-you-with-death”.’ The drifter hasn’t lost any of his Sichuan accent.

A cold, dusty wind sweeps up the pile of receipts and medical records from the chest of drawers, and blows all the calendars off the walls. I hear the pages rustle as they swirl through the air.

‘Be careful, there’s a strong wind,’ a voice shouts up from the ground floor. ‘Don’t stand by your door. There’s no landing left. If you have something to say, climb down tomorrow and speak to the Hong Kong developer.’

‘I won’t jump,’ my mother shouts to a bulldozer’s headlamps. ‘I want to live!’

‘Punish-you-with-death, old lady! If you don’t move out, none of us will get our annual bonuses . . .’

The covered balcony and most of the outer walls and windows of the rest of the flat have fallen down. All the flats to our left and right have been demolished, as have the stairwell and landing behind us. Our flat is now no more than a windy corridor. It’s like a bird’s nest hanging in a tree. I can feel it shaking in the wind.

The hospital corridor stretching before me looked like an abattoir. Everywhere there was dark, clotted blood, freshly splattered red blood, the stench of blood, mud and urine. People were weeping and cursing. Doctors and nurses shouted commands as they darted back and forth. There were ten or so motionless bodies lying on the blood-soaked floor. I couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead.

Wang Fei was taken to a ward at last. We weren’t allowed inside. Another casualty was brought in. He had to be put down in the entrance hall because there was no more room in the corridor. A nurse went out to him, squatted down and shone a torch at the bullet wound beneath his chin. It was a very small hole, with only a few specks of blood around it, but when she checked his pulse she found it had stopped. She turned his head round. There was a huge hole at the back of his neck.

A local resident went over and had a look. ‘He must have been hit by an exploding bullet. They make a small hole when they enter the body, but explode as they exit, leaving behind large wounds like this. Those bullets have been banned by the international community for decades. The animals!’

‘We’ve run out of blood!’ a nurse yelled. Immediately, the twenty or so people milling about rushed over to her and stretched out their arms, all desperate to give blood.

‘I’m O positive,’ I said.

‘If you know your blood group please stand over there,’ the nurse said.

‘How could they have done this? They’re insane, insane!’ A young doctor ran out of a ward, sat on the ground and sobbed into his sleeve. A woman standing at the door knelt down beside him and cried, ‘Help him, please! He’s my brother! I beg you!’

After Wu Bin and I had finished giving blood, I tapped Tang Guoxian, who was leaning against the wall in a daze, and said, ‘Let’s count the bodies and try to draw up a list of names.’ A soldier was lying on the floor next to him. His eyes were closed. I assumed he was dead.

‘Yes, we must do it now before the bodies are taken away,’ said Wu Bin. ‘Let’s split forces. I’ll check if there are any bodies outside.’ He rolled up his sleeves and went to find a pen and paper.

‘You check the morgue, the operating theatre and the wards upstairs,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay down here in outpatients.’ I stared at the blood-soaked corridor. I felt so penned in, I could hardly breathe. I saw another injured person lying on a bench, lifting his hand in the air. I went over to him.

His eyes were open. He’d lost half a leg and his chest was wrapped in bandages. I asked him to give me the name of his university and his parents’ address.

‘Don’t tell my mum, whatever you do. I – I was born in this hospital. My name’s Tao. I’m a high school student.’

‘Where were you hurt?’ The bandages around his chest looked very tight. His left leg, which had been severed at the knee, was also covered in bandages.

‘My leg was crushed and I got two bullets in the . . . chest. The doctor said . . . I’ll be fine. But I know . . . I won’t live.’ His face was smaller than my brother’s. His voice hadn’t broken yet. I was about to tell him that he shouldn’t have come out onto the streets but stopped myself just in time.

I fumbled through my pockets, searching for a piece of paper to write his address on, and finally pulled something out. It was the letter that had been handed to me in the Square. My fingers had smeared it with so much blood that I couldn’t make out what it said.

An elderly female doctor shouted, ‘If any of you are with people who have minor injuries, take them home now! The army will be turning up here soon to arrest the injured.’

‘I’m a Beijing University student,’ I said. ‘I want to make a record of the dead and wounded. Can you lend me a pen?’

‘Look, we’ve written their names and work units here,’ she said. ‘There are students, workers and even government cadres. People from every walk of life.’ I looked at the sheets of paper pinned to the corridor wall and realised that it was a list of the dead. The names were numbered. The number of the latest name recorded was 281. The man next to me said, ‘There was an hour or so when we didn’t have time to record all the names. You’d better go to the morgue and the other rooms in the basement to double-check there. People are dying so fast, we can’t keep up.’

I saw Tang Guoxian at the other end of the corridor, leaning his face against the wall and weeping uncontrollably. The muscles of his back shuddered and twitched. A woman in her late thirties walked over to the list. When she saw the name of a loved one on it, she gasped and fainted. The infant at her feet sat wailing on the blood-drenched floor. All the lights overhead seemed to be shaking.

Another casualty was brought in by an old man in his sixties. Everyone moved out of the way to let them through. ‘She’s been shot in the knee,’ the old man said, holding the blood-splattered girl in his arms. ‘She needs an operation immediately.’

‘Someone get me a torch!’ a doctor said, brushing past me.

I borrowed a pen and went back to speak to the boy called Tao. He was lying on the ground now. I knelt down and looked at him. His glazed eyes were staring at the fluorescent-light tubes on the corridor’s ceiling. A nurse was crouched by his side, writing some notes on a piece of paper.

‘Is he dead?’ I asked, my heart thumping.

‘His pupils are fully dilated,’ she said, continuing to scribble her notes without pausing to look up at me. ‘Help me carry him out, will you?’

A wave of nausea swept through me. I wanted to scream. The inside of my mouth twitched. I wanted to put my hand down my throat and wrench my stomach out.

The nurse removed her face mask and said to me, ‘Go on. You take the head.’

I had no choice but to place my hands underneath the boy’s neck. It felt as though he’d broken out in a cold sweat before he died. The back of his head was wet.

The nurse lifted his leg and we carried him to the bicycle shed in the yard outside. There were already about twenty corpses lying there. The white bandages covering their faces, limbs or chests were stained with red or black blood. Some of the corpses had no shoes.

‘Put him down here, quickly!’ The nurse was about to topple over. She was exhausted. We lowered Tao’s body onto the ground. The corpse next to him had a student identity card on his chest. I could see from the cover that it was a Beijing University card. I picked it up and looked at the name. It said CAO MING . . . I turned away. All I could see was blood. The kind of blood that can never be wiped away. I got up, ran to the wall and retched.

My mother walks to the edge of the room to look at our balcony which is lying in the rubble on the ground. Her shadow sways before my eyes. A loud bang from the bulldozer below frightens her back inside. She grips the frame of my iron bed, squats down and, bursting into tears, pulls out the box of my father’s ashes, and the one she bought for mine. She moves to the edge of the room again, hurls the boxes into the floodlight’s beam and, in her clearest, most resonant tone, sings out, ‘
You are liberated at last! Quickly,run away
 . . .’ As she drops to her knees, the sparrow shrieks. It sounds as though it’s fallen off the bed and broken a wing.

A labourer who’s knocking down a wall next door teeters across a broken beam and peers into my room. ‘Bloody hell! The Fascist has gone mad. Call the foreman. If she kills herself, they’ll dock our pay . . .’

Two or three of them sneak over into my room and shine their torches on the floor. ‘Look – she’s become a vegetable too, now. You can send her off to hospital, and take the other one who’s lying on the bed as well, while you’re about it.’

‘I want to submit a petition! I want go on a march,’ she mumbles. ‘Down with corruption!’

‘Don’t poke her with that stick. If you injure her, you’ll have to pay compensation . . .’

‘Look, there’s white foam coming out of her mouth . . .’

‘Down with . . . Down with . . . Down . . . Down . . .’

‘Be sensible, old lady. Those Hong Kong developers have got the backing of the government. You’re just digging your own grave, acting like this.’

‘I heard that the chairwoman of the company – Zhang Lulu, I think her name is – used to live in this district as a child,’ the drifter says. ‘That’s how the company managed to buy such a bloody big plot of land. They used all her back-door connections.’

So it’s Lulu who is building this shopping centre . . . My mind returns to those winding lanes we used to wander through together. The ancient trees, the sunlight . . .

‘I want to go to the Square. I want to go on a hunger strike . . .’ my mother says blankly.

I went to sit on the kerb outside the hospital. I looked across the street and saw a restaurant with a sign above it that said
LULU
’S
CAFÉ
. I remembered Lulu mentioning that her restaurant was opposite Fuxing Hospital. The door was locked. The painted characters of her name looked like strings of raw bacon. I looked down and saw blood trapped between my toes. I gagged and retched again.

‘If any of you have got any balls, come back to the Square with me and help me rescue some injured people,’ a middle-aged man shouted. I got up and walked over to him. A group of provincial students stumbled towards us, looking dishevelled and exhausted. A few of them had lost their shoes and had wrapped strips of cloth around their feet.

‘Where have you just come from?’ I asked.

‘We were with the last group of students who stayed on the Monument. There’s a massacre taking place in the Square. Don’t go.’

It suddenly occurred to me that I should return to the Liubukou intersection and see if anyone there needed help. I set off, but just before I reached the intersection, a group of residents blocked my path and said, ‘Don’t go any further. Run away, quickly.They’ve just let off another smoke bomb. They don’t want anyone to see the bodies.’

‘The animals!’ said an old man in a long cotton shirt. ‘They must be on drugs. They’re shooting everyone in sight. They’ve got big grins on their faces.’

A woman walked out in her slippers, tears streaming down her face. ‘The soldiers stormed into our courtyard. They said there was a violent thug hiding on our roof and sprayed it with bullets. Fangfang was only ten years old. He was petrified. He’d never seen anything like it. He tried to escape into the back yard, but as soon as he ran, they mowed him down. How could they fire so many bullets at a child? His poor grandfather is so distraught, he can’t speak.’

‘You haven’t got any shoes on, young man. Your feet are bleeding. You should go to the hospital and have them seen to.’

I looked down. My feet were drenched in blood, just as they were when I emerged from my mother’s womb.

Through the gaps between these people’s heads, I could see Bai Ling’s flattened corpse in the distance. As if refusing to be crushed, the flesh and bones had risen a fraction from the tarmac.

I thought about A-Mei and wondered where she was. I wanted to find her . . . I had visions of her moist eyes, and of her glancing round and smiling at me before walking naked into the bathroom . . . Then I heard the tanks start to move again. Everyone around me turned and fled. A woman shouted, ‘That tank’s number is 107. Someone write that down!’