Beijing Coma (6 page)

It all started a couple of days before we were due to break up for the summer holidays. We’d finished our last exams. On my way to school, I noticed that the note I’d left under her flowerpot the night before, asking her out for a film, had been removed. I assumed she’d taken it away and read it.

When I walked through the school gates my form teacher, Mr Xu, called me over and took me to a room where two policemen were waiting for me.

This was the first time that I’d experienced real terror. My stomach went cold, I felt nauseous, then my whole body began to shake.

The policemen asked me my name then said: ‘You must come with us.’

Mr Xu stubbed out his cigarette and said, ‘Dai Wei, you must own up to everything. This is the opportunity to move forward that you’ve been waiting for.’ I opened my mouth, speechless with terror, and nodded. The roar inside my head was so loud I couldn’t hear what the students outside were shouting.

I walked out of the school gates, my head bowed low, with one of the policemen in front of me and the other one behind. I wondered whether my legs were bent. I seemed suddenly to have become much shorter.

When I reached the police station, my skin was hot and sweaty, but my bones felt cold.

I quickly tried to think through what they might have found out about me. I thought of Lulu. Perhaps she had passed around the copy of
A Young Girl’s Heart
that I’d given her, and someone had reported the matter to the police. Perhaps Shuwei, who’d lent me the book in the first place, had been detained, and was now locked up in the room next door. I didn’t know what to do.

I was supposed to take my brother back home for lunch. It was twelve already. Police officers on their way to the canteen passed through the corridor outside holding their aluminium lunch boxes. An oily smell of deep-fried meatballs wafted into the room.

One of the officers who’d arrested me walked in and asked whether I had any money on me.

I searched my pockets and pulled out five jiao’s worth of coins.

He looked at me and said, ‘Go and get yourself some steamed rolls from the stall across the road, then come straight back here.’

I hurried outside and ran over to the stall. I had crossed that road hundreds of times before, but that day everything looked unfamiliar to me: the locust trees seemed taller and larger, the road looked wider too. A stream of yellow smoke rose from the chimney of the dressmaker’s shop and hovered in the windless air. I didn’t recognise any of the faces that passed by.

After lunch, the two officers returned. One of them said, ‘Just own up to what you’ve done. It’s easy to get into this place, but hard to get out.’ Then he left the room.

‘Come here!’ said the other officer. He leaned against the table and lit a cigarette. I didn’t know what he’d eaten, but I could smell chives in the air.

I stood in front of him, holding up my trousers. They’d confiscated my belt to stop me running away. When he looked down at the note he was writing, he reminded me of the electrician who worked in the school boiler room. Black hairs pricked through the pores above his mouth. He put down his pen at last and said, ‘Do you know why we’ve brought you here?’

‘No.’

He sat down and swung his feet up onto the table. He looked like he was about to take a nap. ‘We gave you all morning to think things over. If you own up now, we might let you go. Just tell me what kind of shameful things you’ve been up to recently.’

‘I read
A Young Girl’s Heart
.’ I had been standing up for hours. I longed to squat down.

‘Who gave it to you?’

‘Wang Shuwei.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘He’s in my class at school.’

‘Who else did you pass the book to?’

‘No one. I just read it myself.’

‘Dai Wei. Look into my eyes. Who else read the book? There’s no point lying. We have a list of names.’

I didn’t dare reply to his question.

‘Own up to what you’ve done.’

‘I made a handwritten copy of the book.’

‘So it wasn’t enough for you to read it – you had to copy it out as well.’ He got up and walked over to me. ‘Who did you give the copy to?’ He was shouting now. My legs trembled and I sank into a squat. He kicked me to the ground, grabbed my belt from the table and whipped me over the head. He hit me harder than my father had ever done.

‘I won’t do it again, I promise!’

‘Where is the copy?’ His leather shoe was pressed against my chin.

‘I gave it to Lulu.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Zhang Lulu. She’s in my class as well.’

‘You seem to have been very busy lately. What else have you been up to? Let me prod your memory. Did you not recently wander through your compound singing “
You’re a flower in bud. How I long for you to come into bloom
”? Eh?’ He kicked me to the ground again, then picked up the thermos flask from the table. My mind flashed back to the Cultural Revolution, when a group of Red Guards pulled our neighbour, Granny Li, out of the opera company’s dormitory block and ordered the rest of us to bring out our thermos flasks. Once we’d brought them outside, we had to stand and watch as the Red Guards poured ten flasks of boiling water over Granny Li’s head.

‘Tell me what else you’ve done,’ the officer said, removing the lid of the flask.

I stared at him, rigid with fear and blurted, ‘I’ll never read another pornographic novel again, I promise, or sing any licentious songs, or smoke cigarettes . . .’ I fell onto my knees and sobbed.

‘Little hooligan! If we don’t teach you a lesson now, you’ll end up with a bullet in your head. Look at all these letters we’ve received about you!’ He poured more water into his teacup then pulled out some letters from a file.

I couldn’t see what the letters said, so I quickly racked my brain, searching for another crime that I could confess to. ‘I groped Lulu,’ I finally admitted.

‘Where?’

‘In a cement pipe.’

‘Just the once?’

‘Yes, I haven’t touched her again since then.’

‘Did you trick her into going there with you?’

‘No. We were out on a date.’

‘A date – my arse! That’s not called a date, it’s called having illicit sexual relations! Open your legs!’ He gave me a sharp kick. I howled in pain and rolled onto the concrete floor.

‘You must write down the details of every crime you’ve committed. I want names, places and dates. If you confess to everything, we might let you off. Don’t forget that your dead father was a member of the Five Black Categories. If it hadn’t been for Deng Xiaoping’s Reform Policy and your good marks at school, you would have been executed ages ago, you evil son of a rightist.’

I sat down and started writing. I didn’t want to bring shame upon my school. By nightfall I still hadn’t finished. I heard screams and the sound of breaking glass as someone was being beaten up next door. I hated myself for not being as courageous as the Communist heroes in our textbooks. At the first sign of violence, I’d crumbled and owned up to everything.

The officer looked at my written confession and said, ‘Which hand did you stick into her knickers? How long did you keep it there? Where else did you touch her? I want every detail.’

In the middle of the night I heard my mother shouting in the corridor: ‘My son’s still young. He’s got a lot to learn. I promise I’ll give him a good talking-to . . .’

I broke into tears. My groin was still aching from the policeman’s kick. I felt as though I’d sunk into a hopeless black hole. I didn’t know what punishment was awaiting me. I thought of the convicts I’d seen dragged onto execution grounds during public trials our class had been taken to, and how their bodies shuddered on the ground after the soldiers’ bullets hit their heads. One time our class was allocated front-row seats. When the young convict with the shaven head stood before the firing squad, his eyes seemed suddenly to focus on me. After the bullets struck his head and he fell to the ground, his legs kicked in the air so long that one of his shoes fell off.

The police didn’t let my mother into the room. All they did was pass on the two apples she’d brought for me.

I thought of Liu Ping – the daughter of the Guangxi farm’s education officer whom my father had talked about so fondly. I imagined her in a white skirt, playing her violin like an angel. The image gave me strength. Then I remembered the time my mother and I went to visit my father in the camp in Shandong. We travelled there by long-distance bus. I slept curled up on my seat, my head resting on the canvas bag on my mother’s lap. Inside the bag were gifts she’d brought for my father: a blanket, a jar of pig fat and a woollen hat.

The officer kicked a leg of the table, stirring me from my doze.

‘Wake up! This isn’t a dormitory. I’ve had to stay here all bloody night for you. How many pages have you finished?’

I handed him my seven pages of densely written notes.

He glanced through them. ‘There’s still a lot of information that you’re holding back.’ He checked his watch, lit a cigarette. I breathed in the smoke. It made me feel a little less alone. ‘I’ll give you one last chance. You have until dawn. If you haven’t written everything down by then, we will show you no mercy.’

I searched through my mind again, and dredged up every bad thing I’d done.

I’d once carved a pistol out of a piece of wood and painted it black. It looked very convincing. I’d attached it to my belt, like Li Xiangyang, the heroic leader of the guerrilla force that fought against the Japanese. My mother had told me that people used fake guns to commit robberies, and that it was against the law to own one. I gave details of the time and place of the crime, but there were no victims to report.

I’d killed a chicken with a slingshot, then run away. The victim was a female chicken.

I’d also smashed a window. I’d thrown the stone in an attempt to hit a cat. The only victim of this incident was the windowpane.

Dawn broke at last. I knew this, not because the room became any lighter, but because I could hear buses driving past on the road outside. I caught a whiff of disinfectant. It reminded me of the public latrines across the road from our compound. I hardly ever used them, because we had a toilet in our flat. But my mother often went there. We had to pay for our water now, which we didn’t in the old dormitory block, so my mother preferred to run down six flights of stairs and use the latrines rather than waste money flushing our own toilet. At night, the latrines were the only place in the area where there was a light still shining. After I’d learned how to smoke, I often hung out there in the evening with my friends. When men went in to have a shit, they’d always light a fag and toss the stub onto the floor before they left. We’d quickly pick up the stubs and carry on smoking them. Sometimes we’d snatch the fags from the men’s mouths while they were still pulling up their trousers. The worst they’d ever do would be to call us filthy brats.

One night, one of our gang ran over to me and said, ‘Dai Wei, some of Duoduo’s shit has splashed onto your footrest.’ We’d each assigned ourselves our own hole, and if anyone splashed their shit onto the ceramic footrests of an adjacent hole, they’d get beaten up.

We chased after Duoduo and dragged him back into the latrines. He tried to break free, kicking the wall so hard that chunks of plaster fell off. But there were four of us holding him down, and we had him firmly in our grip. I pulled down his trousers and slapped his arse, and he got an erection. Everyone shouted, ‘Let’s see how big it can get!’ I grabbed hold of his penis and rubbed it hard.

‘Let go! Fuck off! Let go of me!’ His contorted face went bright red. He squatted down, trying to pull his penis free. Tears poured from his eyes. At last he ejaculated. I relaxed my grip and wiped my hands on the wall. We laughed as we pushed him out onto the street. He ran away, holding up his trousers, his silhouette growing smaller and smaller.

Three people had hung themselves in those latrines. One of them was an old woman who’d travelled up from the countryside. When she arrived in Beijing, she visited our local police station and made enquiries about a Mr Qian who’d been imprisoned by the Communists in the 1940s. The police informed her that this Mr Qian had been executed shortly after Liberation. They later discovered that the woman was Mr Qian’s wife, and had been incarcerated since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. When she was released from jail, the village head had refused to allocate her any land, so she came to Beijing to look for her husband. After she heard the news of his death, she hung herself in the women’s latrines . . .

I’d already refilled the fountain pen three times from the ink pot on the policeman’s desk. I felt as heavy as a sack of concrete. My legs were shaking with exhaustion.

A few hours later, my mother came to take me home.

As soon as we walked through the gates of our compound, I heard Duoduo shout, ‘You’re a big shot now, young man! Spent the night at a police station! That’s quite something!’

‘Bugger off!’ my mother yelled.

In that instant, all the fear I’d felt in the police station melted away. Although my swollen testicles had rubbed my inner thighs raw, I was still able to stand upright. Had the police turned up to arrest me again, I would have sauntered back to the station with them, whistling as I went.

When we stepped inside our flat my mother slapped me hard on both cheeks. ‘You shameful little hooligan! How can I hold my head up now?’ She pointed to my father’s ashes in the box under her bed, and shouted at them, ‘This is all your fault, Dai Changjie! I had to bear the burden of your crimes for twenty years, and now I’m burdened with those of your son!’ I cried when I saw my mother sob, and when my brother saw me crying, he burst into tears too.

I promised my mother that I’d never read another banned novel, and begged her to let me go to sleep. She wiped her tears. I collapsed onto her bed and dozed off, my legs twitching with tiredness.