Beijing Coma (37 page)

‘You – you really are too bureaucratic,’ he stuttered angrily.

It seemed ridiculous that an anti-bureaucratic struggle had already erupted in this half-hatched, illegal organisation.

‘Well, let’s get the leader to decide,’ Tian Yi said, settling in to her new role.

They marched off to Ke Xi’s room, Tian Yi striding ahead and the boy following behind her. I decided to tag along too.

Ke Xi was cleanly dressed and had just had a haircut. Instead of coming to me for a quick trim, as he usually did, he’d gone to a barbershop and had it clipped short at the back, in the conservative style of a Communist Youth League member.

He was pacing around the room, talking to his subordinates. ‘You must be patient,’ he said. ‘As I’ve told you before, the students who are still attending classes are not our enemies. We need to bring them onto our side. Unity is strength. Set up picket lines outside the classrooms, and urge them to join the boycott. You’re the core members of the student movement. This is the time to show us what you’re made of!’

The guys he was lecturing to looked like computer science students. As they turned round and headed for the door, the people waiting outside swarmed into the room and occupied the vacated benches. Mimi was writing down every word Ke Xi uttered.

Tian Yi couldn’t squeeze herself through the crowd, so I barged my way forward, tapped Ke Xi on the shoulder and said, ‘Ke Xi, this student here is setting up his own records office. He wants to take away the business cards he collected, and he refuses to let anyone have copies. Can you try to talk him round?’

‘What business cards?’ Ke Xi said, moving his eagle eyes towards the boy. A student standing next to me handed Ke Xi a cigarette and lit it for him.

‘I’m a history student,’ the boy said, pulling a few business cards out of the box and handing them to Ke Xi. ‘I collected these cards myself in the Square.’

Ke Xi passed the cards to me, glanced into the box and said, ‘These cards should be kept in the records office, but the administration office should retain copies of them.’ He sucked on his cigarette. ‘That’s the only solution.’

I flicked through the cards and spotted ones from the
Beijing Daily
, the
Hong Kong International Trade Bulletin
, the Beijing Bureau of Statistics and the Changsha Yellow Mud Street Bookshop.

‘Is that settled now, then?’ Tian Yi said to the boy. ‘I’ll photocopy them at the printers then return them to you.’ Tian Yi grabbed the box back from the history student and squeezed herself out of the room.

‘Dai Wei, how are things going your end?’ Ke Xi asked me, ignoring the many visitors, including foreign journalists, who’d crowded inside to talk to him. He hadn’t visited Shu Tong’s dorm since the argument he’d had with Wang Fei a few days earlier. Both he and Han Dan supported the mass march planned for the 27th, but all the science students, apart from Old Fu, were against it. The Organising Committee was going to vote on the matter in the afternoon.

‘I’m setting up a public-address system, so that we can have our own little broadcast station. We’ve raised enough money to buy an amplifier and some loudspeakers.’

‘Great! You must make sure you broadcast louder than the university’s station. This morning they were telling everyone to come out with flags and denounce the “troublemakers”.’

‘We won’t be able to drown them out. They have hundreds of loudspeakers, and lots of high-wattage amplifiers and transformers. We’ll have to make do with the electricity source in our dorm, which will power only four speakers at most.’

‘We can buy more equipment when we have more money. Make sure the receipts are made out to the Organising Committee, then I can sign them and reimburse you. The radio station will play a crucial role in our movement.’

‘Yes, it will help keep the students on our side.’ Ke Xi’s smugness was grating on me.

‘As a member of the supervisory office, I hope you’ll keep a close watch on the committee members, and make sure they stick to the guidelines.’ When Ke Xi took a drag from his cigarette, he looked like one of those dissolute youths who hang out in train stations.

I’d completely forgotten that I’d been appointed not only to the security office, but also the supervisory office, together with Wang Fei, Cao Ming and the creative writing student Zheng He.

Tian Yi agreed to accompany me to the electrical store. She packed the business cards and two rolls of film into her briefcase and said we could stop off at the printers on the way.

It was pouring with rain outside. We opened our umbrellas and walked out of the campus.

‘Ke Xi has got a “histrionic personality disorder”,’ I said, using a term I’d seen in Tian Yi’s lecture notes. ‘He always has to be the centre of attention.’

She pretended not to hear me. A-Mei used to ignore me like that too. When a minibus drove up I said, ‘Come on, let’s take it. I don’t want to have to fight for a seat.’ The fares of this privately run service were expensive, but I had three hundred yuan in donations in my pocket, so I decided we could afford this small luxury.

We squeezed inside and sat at the back. She wiped the raindrops from her face, then stroked my damp hair and said, ‘Are you disappointed you weren’t invited to the secret meeting?’

‘You mean the one in the Old Summer Palace where they set up the Beijing Students’ Federation, or the Provisional Federation of Beijing Universities as we’re supposed to call it? Liu Gang organised it.’

‘Yes, do you feel left out?’ she smiled.

‘I’m not the ambitious one. In the beginning, you were telling me not to get involved, but look at you now! Don’t you think you’re taking that little office of yours a bit too seriously?’

‘If I agree to do something, I’ll do it well. We mustn’t look like amateurs. If this movement is going to succeed, everyone must get involved. I can’t understand those students who’ve taken advantage of the boycott to go on holiday. I want to stay in Beijing and be a witness to history.’

‘Not all those students have gone on holiday. Sister Gao told me the Federation sent three hundred students to go and link up with the provincial universities and tell them what we’re up to.’ Liu Gang had persuaded Sister Gao to join the Beijing Students’ Federation, and had appointed her deputy chairwoman.

‘I’ve heard a rumour that half the members of the Federation have applied for passports,’ Tian Yi said. ‘They’re working to save the nation, while secretly making plans to leave it. They really are suffering from split-personality syndrome.’

‘Anyone who’s scored more than 600 in the TOEFL exam is bound to have made plans to go abroad. It’s not unpatriotic to own a passport, you know.’

‘They all want to run away to graduate school in America,’ she said, ignoring me. ‘They have no ideals.’

Her hand was resting on my lap. The numbers she’d written on it with a ballpoint pen had been smudged by the rain.

‘Didn’t we agree we’d both go abroad next year?’ I said. ‘Don’t change your mind now. I wouldn’t want to go alone.’ She’d previously hinted to me that she’d accompany me to America if I was offered a place at a university there.

‘I’ll have to think things through again. This student movement has changed everything.’

‘I never think things through. I just seem to go with the flow. If my cousin Kenneth hadn’t sent me that sponsor letter, I wouldn’t have taken the TOEFL exam. When this student movement took off, I thought I might as well get involved. It seemed the honourable thing to do. But I’m not fanatical. If it were to end tomorrow, I wouldn’t be disappointed.’

She turned her hand, pressing her palm against mine. It felt soft and cold.

‘I’ve heard that someone’s given the Chinese literature students a cheque for 40,000 yuan, but no bank will dare cash it,’ I said.

‘I don’t know about the money side of things. I can’t stand those economics students who run the accounts office. My psychology classmates aren’t much better. A few days ago, they were only interested in playing Mahjong. Now they’ve all tied red bandannas around their heads and joined the revolution! How can you trust people like that?’

‘Why did you encourage them to join the class boycott then?’ I asked, feeling she was being a little hard on them.

She ignored my question again, and said, ‘Which of the leaders do you think is most ambitious?’ She suddenly seemed less intelligent.

‘It’s hard to say. Han Dan’s supposed to take over the chairmanship of the Beijing Students’ Federation next week, but I doubt Ke Xi will let him.’ Liu Gang had decided that the Federation should have a new chairman every week, much to Ke Xi’s annoyance.

‘Ke Xi is deluded if he thinks he can stop Han Dan.’

‘Yes, Han Dan and Yang Tao are the only members of the Democracy Salon on the Organising Committee, but they’ve managed to form a small clique.’

‘I hate cliques,’ she said. ‘Your Pantheon Society has formed one too, hasn’t it?’

‘Well, you and I don’t have to get involved in the power struggles. We can just stick to doing the practical stuff. The news centre wants to set up a printing room. They’ve sent two students off to Xinhua News Agency’s printing works to see how it’s done. Shu Tong said that once we’ve got the computer system set up, we’ll be able to print off 40,000 leaflets in one night.’

The minibus filled with the smell of diesel fumes. We were stuck in a jam at an intersection. Cyclists weaved past us on both sides, ringing their bells. The rain had almost stopped.

‘I recorded a Voice of America programme from the radio last night. It was about the situation of Chinese intellectuals. Look!’ She handed me the transcript she’d made. The characters were graceful and fluid.

‘No wonder you didn’t come to see me last night,’ I said, putting my arm round her shoulder. ‘Once we’ve got the PA system working tonight, you can read this out to the students.’

She pushed my arm away and said, ‘Don’t touch me. I’ve got my period.’ There were beads of sweat on her forehead. Her breath smelt sour. ‘You must remind me to buy some more wax paper for the mimeograph machine. I’ll have to go to the wholesalers. The government has banned shops in the university district from stocking it.’ She blew away a few strands of hair that were dangling over her face and pulled up the collar of her red-andgrey striped jumper. ‘We’ll need to print off a lot of leaflets for the march on the 27th,’ she continued, her eyes red with fatigue. ‘At least enough to fill this minibus, I should think.’

As I listened to her talk about these things, I sensed a distance opening between us.

Suddenly the face of Lulu, the first girl I fell in love with, flashed through my mind. It took me back to that night when she sat next to me inside the large concrete pipe, her whole body shivering from the cold. I looked at the traffic outside and felt a wave of sadness sweep over me.

‘Number nine dribbles the ball past two defenders, but is intercepted by Peterson. Five takes it away, passes to seven, who strikes, and – oh dear! – hits the goalpost . . .’ The radio programme is so loud it drowns out the soap opera blaring from the television in the flat next door.

An Qi is pushing my head down so that my mother can cut my hair. She’s been here for an hour, but her hands are still colder than my mother’s.

‘Do you clean his teeth every day?’ she asks.

‘Yes, with cotton wool,’ my mother says. ‘And I wash him twice a day with a wet flannel. He’s completely incontinent. Look at all those pads I’ve hung out to dry. If I forget to put one on him before I take him out, it always ends in disaster.’

In fact my mother rarely bothers to wash me or clean my teeth.

‘My husband has his bladder cleaned out regularly,’ says An Qi. ‘It costs three hundred yuan each time.’

‘Can you put that plastic sheet around his shoulders? His hair’s so thin now, there’s not much for me to cut. Yes, block his ears up with the cotton wool. That’s right . . . Look, that’s the bullet wound, just above the ear. Feel how soft it is. The hair won’t grow back.’ An Qi presses the wound with her cold finger. ‘The brain’s right there under the skin,’ my mother continues. ‘There’s no bone in between. It’s freezing outside. I must put a woollen hat on him before we set off for the hospital.’

‘You should rub safflower oil on his back,’ An Qi says. ‘It would help heal those bedsores, and bring his temperature down as well. It smells horrible, though.’ An Qi is younger than my mother, but not as strong as her.

‘Look how inflamed my knuckles are,’ my mother says as she pulls the thermometer from my mouth. ‘Mmm, still forty degrees . . .’

I wish the fever would shoot up and kill me. But as I listen to my blood circulate through my body, I know I have no control over my fate. If I could, I’d jump into a volcano. My existence brings only trouble to those around me.

‘Shall I take him down now?’ a voice cries from the sitting room. It’s Gouzi, an electrician who works in the restaurant across the road. He came up to our flat last month to paint some walls.

‘All right,’ my mother says. ‘Take the quilt with you. We’ll join you in a minute. I just have to finish packing his bag.’

I’m draped over Gouzi’s back now, inhaling the charcoal dust on his coat. My head swings from side to side as he carries me down the stairwell. My mother forgot to put a hat on me. A cold wind blasts through the scar tissue of my bullet wound and freezes the blood vessels beneath. I see a blur of white stars.

When he puts me down on a tricycle cart outside, the freezing air causes my frontal lobes to seize up. I sense a small crowd gather around me.

‘Is he dead?’ a man whispers.

‘It’s the guy from the third floor. He’s a vegetable. He can’t eat or drink. He’s been like this for over two years.’

‘Is he still breathing?’