Beijing Coma (24 page)

The lights in the dorm had been switched off, but a glow from the lamps outside filtered through the window. I could see photographs of film stars torn from a calendar pasted to the wall behind Wang Fei. Their eyes stared intently ahead. In the dark, smoky air, the women looked like empresses from some mysterious realm.

Old Fu on the bed above me was listening to Voice of America. He took the TOEFL exam every year, and always got high grades. He was hoping to get a place at Harvard.

I could smell the steamed bun that had burned while being heated over an electric hob, and the jar of spicy fermented tofu that Wang Fei kept in his bedside cabinet.

I was lying on someone’s empty bed. My mind was troubled, but I didn’t want anyone to know. Something terrible had happened between Tian Yi and me, and I hadn’t seen her for two days.

‘You’re the one who’s been bonking all the virgins,’ Shu Tong said to Wang Fei, tapping the side of his bed with a book. ‘That girl you took behind your bed curtain last night, I bet she was another one.’

‘Whatever happens behind this curtain is my own business,’ Wang Fei called back. ‘You should respect my human rights.’

‘Was she a virgin?’ Old Fu asked suddenly. Although he was older than the rest of us, he’d never had a girlfriend.

‘You made so much noise I didn’t sleep a wink all night,’ Shu Tong grumbled.

Big Chan and Little Chan walked in. The dust blown in from the corridor always reeked of the men’s toilets, and made you want a cigarette. Big Chan switched the lights on and Little Chan dumped a thermos of hot water onto the table. When Big Chan poured some hot water into his lunch box, I immediately smelt a whiff of bean sprouts. Everyone suspected that Big Chan had tricked the drifter into leaving the campus the week before, because it was his dorm’s turn to look after him this week.

I thought about the application forms I’d sent off to various American universities a few days before. My academic results and TOEFL score were high enough to get me a place at a middle-ranking college. The day I sent them, Tian Yi said to me, ‘Don’t stay in China. You’ll be much better off in America. And with your rich great-uncle, you won’t even have to worry about getting a scholarship.’

I tried to go to sleep but my mind flitted back to the woods beyond the campus walls.

Two days before, Tian Yi and I had decided to leave the crowded campus and go for a quiet walk. We walked to the end of the football pitch, sneaked over an ancient red wall and entered the deserted grounds of the Old Summer Palace. There was spring blossom on the peach trees growing wild on a grassy mound. At the foot of the slope a stream flowed silently towards a distant lake.

Tian Yi was wearing a black dress tied at the waist with a red leather belt. The dappled sunlight fell on her neck and shoulders.

This side of the wall was darker and damper, and covered in thick creepers. The peach trees were ragged and unkempt. Against their pale-green leaves, Tian Yi looked like a celestial fairy about to take flight. I was amazed to find this rural haven hidden beyond our campus walls. Tian Yi and I lay down on the grass beneath the peach trees. I kissed the warm splashes of sunlight on her skin.

We hadn’t had a chance to make love in the two months since we’d returned from Yunnan.

‘You want to?’ she whispered, pulling my hand away from her thighs. ‘Then take your trousers off. I want to see it . . .’ Her face was the same pale pink as the blossom on the trees above.

‘Men’s bodies aren’t that great to look at, you know.’ I unbuttoned her dress and watched the sunlight fall on her breasts.

She stood up and combed her fingers through her hair. There were blades of damp grass stuck to the top of her pale feet, and fine leaves caught between her toes. Her nails looked like fallen petals. She pulled off her knickers, climbed out of her dress then squatted down in front of me, her black pubic hair brushing against the green grass.

‘Do you see? I’ve got my period . . .’

I stared at the dark flesh between her pale thighs, pulled her down and rolled on top of her, licking her face. She dug her fingers into my back and grabbed my hair. We writhed against each other. As I poured myself into her I felt her thighs shudder.

‘Get up! Get up!’ someone shouted, kicking my legs. Behind us were three men, bending beneath the low branches.

‘Get up, you little hooligans! We’re taking you to the Summer Palace police station.’

We hurriedly got dressed. ‘She’s my girlfriend,’ I said, standing up. ‘We’re at university together.’ The men were all shorter than me. Each held a wooden baton.

‘You’re hooligans,’ said the fat officer who seemed to be in charge. ‘We’re arresting you now and you can talk later.’

‘We have our student cards.’ Tian Yi was clutching her bra and a clump of grass in her hand. Strands of hair were stuck to her damp cheeks.

‘Hurry up now!’ The fat officer grabbed the cards without looking at them. The other two impatiently tapped the branches with their batons.

‘We’re going out together, we’re not hooligans,’ Tian Yi said, once she’d buttoned up her dress.

‘Don’t you know that it’s against the law to have intercourse before marriage?’ said the fat one. Then he glanced at the officer in sunglasses and said, ‘Take her away and get her to tell you all she knows about his family background.’

The officer in sunglasses led Tian Yi down the grassy slope. She was still clasping her rolled-up bra in her hand.

‘What’s her name? Tell us!’ the other two shouted.

‘Tian Yi,’ I replied.

‘What’s her father’s name?’

I knew that if I named her father and his work unit, Tian Yi’s future would be ruined. I was determined to keep silent.

‘You don’t want to tell us? You want us to beat you up? We saw what you two were up to. We’ll take you back to the station and examine your trousers. Any sperm, and you’ll get at least five years!’ He poked me in the thigh with his baton.

I panicked. ‘I’m sorry, comrades. It was wrong of me to bring her here. Please let us go. We’ll never come back again. We’ll be good students from now on and study hard.’

‘Let you go? Do you know where you are? You’ve illegally trespassed onto a state-protected heritage site and you’ve committed an obscene act. That’s two offences. What’s more, the university regulations clearly forbid students to have relationships during term time.’

‘But we’re in love, we couldn’t help it. I give you my word that we won’t do this again. We’ll concentrate on our studies. Please let us go.’

‘If you want to go back to the campus, you’ll have to leave us a deposit of at least three hundred yuan. But I’ll have to discuss it with my two mates first.’

I pulled out all the money from my pockets. Fortunately, the day before I’d gone home and collected 120 yuan to cover a month’s living expenses. The fat officer took the notes from me without looking and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he lit a cigarette, inhaled, and let a puff of smoke escape through the gaps in his yellow teeth.

‘This won’t even cover our overtime pay. Squat down and don’t move until we return. We’re going to talk to the university’s security office.’

I stared down at the dirty green weeds and the moving shadows of the branches. After a while, I raised my head and looked at the path Tian Yi had walked down. The grass on the slope was still. Now and then a bird cried out as it flitted between the trees. I wondered where they’d taken Tian Yi.

At last, I plucked up my courage, stood up and followed the wall downhill. When I reached the stream at the bottom of the slope, I saw her. She was alone, standing against the wall, shaking so much that she couldn’t speak. I hurriedly gave her a leg-up, and we clambered back over the wall into the campus. There were fewer trees there, so it was much brighter. Students were kicking a ball about. Tian Yi was still shaking. She could hardly walk. I sat down with her on the grass. She bit her sleeve then sobbed into her folded arms.

For the next forty-eight hours, Tian Yi wouldn’t speak to me. Her dorm mates told me that she’d come down with flu and needed to rest. When I went to visit her, she told me to go away. I wasn’t brave enough to ask her what the police had done to her. I knew that even if I did ask, she wouldn’t tell me. I hated myself for having taken her to that place, and for allowing the police to lead her away.

Then, when I was eating supper in the canteen, I overheard someone say that a gang of thugs had been prowling the grounds of the Old Summer Palace pretending to be policemen, extorting cash from students they caught having sex. They’d made a fortune from the racket, he said. Something in my memory exploded: policemen don’t refer to their colleagues as ‘mates’. How could I have failed to notice?

Apparently, the men were bicycle menders. One day they pounced on a foreign student who was having sex with an English major, and extorted two hundred US dollars. They paid backhanders to the police authorities at the Summer Palace. It was a good business. They caught an average of seven couples a day in those woods. We’d been duped by a gang of thugs. I didn’t dare tell Tian Yi. I knew it would only make her feel worse.

Wang Fei’s dorm was so smoky that, after dozing off for a few minutes, I woke up again with a sore throat.

‘Well, next time you bring a girl back, just let us know first,’ Shu Tong said, still annoyed at having been kept awake by Wang Fei’s noisy shenanigans the night before.

‘No, we should have a rule that girls are only brought back to the dorm on Sunday nights,’ Old Fu said.

‘But there are eight of us. If we take turns to bring a girl back on Sunday nights, we’ll only get some action once every two months.’ Wang Fei wasn’t happy.

‘What is this, a brothel?’ I shouted, unable to restrain myself. ‘It’s one o’clock already, for God’s sake!’ My throat burned as I swallowed a sip of water.

‘Dai Wei! Can you hear me? It’s your mother . . . My God! His eyelids are moving. They’re really moving. I haven’t been wasting my time. All those injections have paid off. My God! Let me put another pillow under your head!’

I too sense that I’m emerging from a deep sleep. I can feel my four limbs, the head that my mother is propping up, the drip attached to my arm. A strong smell of disinfectant charges into my brain. I can tell that my body is intact and lying flat on the bed.

Perhaps everything is all right now. Perhaps I can return to the world.

‘You’re a survivor, my son,’ my mother says. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll do my best to get you out of this country. Listen, I’ll sing you a song. I used to sing this to you when you were a baby. As soon as you heard it, you’d stop crying at once . . . “
Pick up your pen and use it as a sword! The Party is our mother and father. Whoever dares criticise the Party will be banished to the depths of Hell!
” Oh dear, you won’t like those lyrics. Never mind. So long as you can hear your mother’s voice . . . Today is 23 April, 1990. You’ve been back from hospital for a few months now. Although you probably had no idea you were there. The doctor said that people who sink into comas like yours are usually dead within six months. But look, you’re still alive. I told you not to get involved in the student movement. Oh God, you’d be better off staying in your coma. The police said that as soon as you wake up, they’ll come up and arrest you.’

My ears transmit the noise of my mother’s sobbing and sighs to my temporal lobes. Then images and conversations that have passed through my mind slowly return to me again: Mao Da sitting opposite the drifter, chewing peanuts . . . ‘Beat him up, I say! What an insult to the Chinese people!’ . . . ‘Not many science students have turned up. Did you bring the banner?’ . . . ‘Stick out your tongue and swallow these pills’ . . . A-Mei’s reflection in the mirror staring me straight in the eye . . . ‘I’ve arrested lots of hooligans like you before, and they all get a good beating . . .’

The real world seems to grow distant once more.

The bullet struck me in the head. I remember a line of soldiers holding guns, and A-Mei walking towards them. When the guns fired, she knelt on the ground. Then my head cracked open. That’s how it happened.

So, is A-Mei still alive? Was it really her I saw? Did Tian Yi visit me in hospital the night I was injured? Yes, she stood by my bed. My skin remembers the touch of her hand. But what happened before the shot was fired? Was Mou Sen struck down? Did Wang Fei die too in a pool of blood?

Images dart through my mind. I see Wang Fei’s bloodshot eyes. He opened the door to my dorm and shouted, ‘I’m going to make some posters to commemorate General Secretary Hu Yaobang! His death is a terrible loss for the Chinese democracy movement!’ He’d just picked up the news of his death from Voice of America. His headphones were dangling from his neck.

THE MAN WHO SHOULDN’T HAVE DIED HAS DIED
,
WHILE THE MEN WHO SHOULD BE DEAD STILL LIVE
, he scribbled in chalk over the walls and tables of the dorm. Then he bit deep into his finger, and with the blood that dripped from the wound wrote
THE PEOPLE
 . . .

‘Damn!’ he said as the flow dried up. ‘Why’s there so little blood?’ Recently, Wang Fei had fallen for a trainee pathologist at Beijing Union Hospital. She’d gone out with him once, rather against her will, and had then left his calls unanswered.

‘You’re a cold-blooded animal, that’s why.’ Chen Di was lying on his bed reading a magazine.

‘Shut up! Some of us are trying to have a nap!’ I shouted. Since the incident in the Old Summer Palace I’d been tense and irritable. Although Tian Yi was speaking to me again, she wouldn’t let me touch her.

‘If you lot hadn’t taken to the streets and demonstrated in 1987, Hu Yaobang wouldn’t have been forced to resign from his post,’ Mao Da said. ‘And now the poor man is dead.’