Beijing Coma (81 page)

Yes. I heard Shao Jian was detained at the Martial Law Headquarters after saying he’d seen students killed in Tiananmen Square, which the government still refuses to acknowledge. He was tortured for days until he finally agreed to write a statement refuting what he’d said. But he was sent to jail nevertheless.

‘If you wake up, we might make a good couple. So try a bit harder, will you?’

You told me that when you joined the research institute, you felt as though you were slipping into your grave. You don’t realise that the body itself is a grave. I dreamed about you the other night. You were locked in a drawer. I tried to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge.

‘You’re a miracle. If you were in a foreign country, you’d be famous by now.’

Your voice keeps flitting up and down. I remember what a slender neck you have, and how I thought when I first met you that you must have a narrow larynx. I asked you which work unit you belonged to, and you glanced up at me and said, ‘You sound like a policeman.’

She wipes my eyes with a ball of cotton wool dipped in eye lotion. The little finger pressing against my face feels as though it’s entering my flesh.

‘Your corneas are infected. Even if you were to open your eyes one day, you probably wouldn’t be able to see much. Your mother should sew the lids together to prevent them getting reinfected.’ Her fingertips are cooler than her palm. Her sleeve brushes over my face as she moves her arm.

‘Your heart’s beating faster. You know that someone’s speaking to you, don’t you? What are you thinking?’

I’m thinking that whenever you walk into this flat, everything seems to come alive . . . Do you remember my girlfriend? She’s getting married. She’s set the date already: Christmas Day, 1999. She’s marrying a German architect. She says she’ll never come back to China again. She doesn’t want to live in a country where the police knock on your door every day.

Mou Sen and I walked over to the Goddess of Democracy. We’d helped carry pieces of the statue into the Square the night before.

‘Someone climbed onto the scaffolding last night and tried to knock the statue over,’ Mou Sen says. ‘The students pulled him down, but let him go after a few minutes.’ As he spoke, he took off his imported beige jacket that I assumed Nuwa had bought for him.

‘What’s the matter with us?’ I said, ‘If someone vandalises the portrait of a tyrant, we arrest them, but if they try to destroy a symbol of democracy we let them go.’

Zhang Jie walked up and said, ‘Have you heard? Taiwanese students want to get a million people to link hands across Taiwan in solidarity with us . . . What happened to your cheek, Dai Wei?’ It was already very hot now, but he was still wearing his black leather jacket. I hadn’t seen him in the Square much since he’d returned to the campus after the hunger strike.

‘We broke up another coup last night,’ I explained. ‘The guy who punched me was wearing a ring with a hidden spike.’ I kicked aside an empty lemonade bottle lying in my path. The white polystyrene lunch boxes littering the ground were irritatingly bright. The night before, a student had stormed onto the Monument’s upper terrace with a group of friends and declared himself commander-in-chief. We had to use force to get them to leave. During the fight, Chen Di’s binoculars fell on the ground and smashed into pieces.

Zhang Jie smirked awkwardly, uncertain how to respond. He was the kind of aloof, insecure guy that girls find least attractive.

Mou Sen had persuaded Tang Guoxian and Wu Bin to help set up his Democracy University. During the preparatory meeting the day before, he’d appointed himself chancellor, made Nuwa general secretary, Tang Guoxian admissions officer, Old Fu vice chancellor and Little Chan head of public relations.

We soon found ourselves crushed in the excited crowd that had gathered around the statue. The white goddess, constructed of styrofoam and papier mâché, towered above us, her hands raising a torch towards the blue sky. She was as tall as a three-storey building. Her face was still concealed beneath a sheet of red silk.

‘So they managed to put it up in the end!’ Mou Sen cried. ‘Those art students must have worked through the night. Many Beijing residents came to help after you left. They were amazing. When the students were building the pedestal, they called for some saws, and immediately four or five saws appeared from nowhere. A few hours later, they said they were tired and could do with some congee, and within minutes, the residents wheeled over a trolley with enough congee to feed an army.’ Mou Sen was very excited. Tian Yi’s camera was hanging around his neck.

The crowd grew impatient. Students were setting up microphones and speakers at the foot of the statue. I spotted Wu Bin over there, supervising the security cordon that circled the base. He allowed us through the cordon and let us sit with the journalists. Student representatives from eight Beijing art colleges sat nearby, waiting to take part in the unveiling ceremony.

A girl even more graceful and slender than Nuwa stood up and announced that the ceremony was about to begin. If she’d been wearing a white dress, she would have looked like a goddess herself. Mou Sen told me she was a film actress.

The art students stood up, and together with a few Beijing citizens pulled the red silk sheet from the statue’s face and released balloons into the air. All eyes in the Square gazed up at the Goddess.

‘She looks like Tian Yi,’ Zhang Jie said, craning his neck. ‘Her hair’s a bit shorter, that’s all.’

Although the features were a little coarse, she was a good replica of New York’s Statue of Liberty. She rose majestically from the middle of the Square, directly opposite Chairman Mao’s portrait, staring resolutely into the distance, her mouth tightly pursed. When I looked up at her, I felt a renewed sense of courage.

Students from the Academy of Music stood up and sang ‘The Blood-stained Spirit’ and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Bare-chested boys from the Dance Academy performed a Shaanxi Province folk-dance, beating drums tied to their waists. The jubilant ceremony then came to an end and the crowds began to scatter.

‘Today’s paper says the authorities have called the erecting of the Goddess of Democracy an illegal act, and an affront to China’s national pride and democratic image,’ Hai Feng said, walking up with a newspaper in his hand. He too had been going back to the campus every night, and usually only turned up at the Square in the afternoon.

‘Look, the peasant marchers from Daxing County have arrived!’ Zhang Jie said. The huge parade of marchers poured into the Square chanting ‘Support Li Peng!’ and ‘Down with Professor Fang Li!’

‘So they’re attacking the astrophysicist Fang Li,’ Hai Feng laughed. ‘I bet none of those peasants can even read.’

‘The Daxing County propaganda department bribed them into joining the march with the promise of free boxed lunches,’ I said, feeling a sudden wave of hunger.

‘Your mother’s gone to do her Falun Gong exercises in the yard outside,’ Wen Niao says. ‘Can you hear the music?’

She turns up the radio and starts to dance to the love song that’s playing. I hear her feet twisting, her bracelets clinking against her watch and her soft humming echoing in the back of her throat.

‘So, is it nice, having a woman dance for you? Are you happy now?’ She’s breathing faster.

The jasmine tea has cooled down, so now I can smell her hair and the feminine scent of her neck as she pulls off her muslin scarf.

‘
You arrived in my life like a beautiful mistake. I still don’t know who you are. Your tenderness confuses me. I’m lost in a maze of mist . . .
’ She swirls about as she sings. She’s very happy, and so am I. I’ve almost forgotten I’m in a coma.

‘
I offered you my love, but you said you didn’t want it. Did I upset you in some way?
’ She lies down on my bed, takes a deep breath, then moves on top of me. ‘
Now you are mine, but I’m still not happy. If you love me, say it to my face
 . . .’ She leans down and whispers into my ear, ‘If only all men were like you. You’re wonderful. You never go out to nightclubs or play around with other women.’ She lets out a long sigh then continues, ‘What’s going through your mind, wooden man? I want to tell you a secret. I was a Living Buddha in my past life. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been looking out of my window, waiting for the Tibetan lamas to turn up and take me back to my old monastery . . .’

I can feel her eyes staring at me. She breathes over my face. The smell of tobacco and alcohol on her warm breath excites the nerve cells in my nose as I inhale. I sense my breath enter her nostrils then flow out again as she exhales. My breath smells different when it emerges from her body. I can smell us both in that single outbreath. The blend of male and female scents is as arousing to me as a kiss.

‘It’s a shame you couldn’t see me dance just now,’ she says quietly, then begins to sing to me again. ‘
Don’t tell me you don’t understand. I’ve poured my heart out to you
 . . . Karaoke bars have sprung up all over the city. If you feel a bit low, you can get a group of friends together and sing the whole night away. It’s wonderful. Can you hear me?’ Wen Niao’s voice seems to have suddenly acquired a beautiful, angelic tone.

She takes off her watch and tucks it under my pillow.

Her hand is cooler than my skin. When it sweeps across my stomach, it feels like rain falling on a hot, dry field.

She lifts the quilt that’s draped over me. I sense her staring at my penis, then touching it with her fingers. ‘It’s as hard as an obelisk. You don’t mind if I touch it, do you, young man? You want me, don’t you?’

It must be sticking up in the air now, stiff and erect.

She turns the light out. I hear her unbuckle her belt and take off her trousers and shoes. Then she lies on top of me, holds my penis in one hand and strokes herself with the other. Moaning softly, she rises into a squat then sits down on me. I feel myself enter her soft flesh. She lets out a gasp, then swerves from side to side, squeezing me tightly between her warm, damp walls. I feel myself becoming hotter and hotter until at last my sperm spills out. Some of it drips down between her legs, the rest begins to slowly die inside her.

At last I’ve left my body. I can hear her watch still ticking beneath my pillow.

My penis shrinks away from the pool of sperm, but her warm flesh still holds me within its grip, assuaging the feeling of emptiness that wells up inside me.

I inhale the smell of the sperm that’s been locked inside me for so long, the smell of the sheet our warm bodies rubbed against and the scent of sesame-seed paste on her breath, and feel my organs become more vigorous. While the spongeous tissue of my penis is still pulsating, Wen Niao gets dressed and leaves the flat.

My mother returns, switches the radio back on and says, ‘Where’s Wen Niao? She said she’d wait here until I came back.’

I wish she’d shut up and leave me in peace. I don’t want this moment of bliss to slip away. It may never return again.

I see a gleaming expanse of snow marked with a trail of Wen Niao’s footprints.

Wen Niao’s parting words echo through my mind. ‘You’re wonderful,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe your mother’s thinking of selling one of your kidneys.’

‘If the government reforms the health insurance system, I’ll be in terrible trouble. Most of Dai Wei’s medication costs are reimbursed by the opera company I used to belong to. I just ask the pharmacists to put my name on the receipt instead of his. Do you think the reforms are really going to go ahead?’ My mother is in the sitting room, talking to Auntie Hao from the neighbourhood committee.

‘Well, it says so in today’s
People’s Daily
. We’re going to be hit hard too. My husband gets three hundred yuan of his medication costs reimbursed every month. If the government cuts the subsidies by 70 per cent, I don’t know how we’ll cope.’ Until a month ago, Auntie Hao had only been to our flat twice, but now she drops by three times a week. The neighbourhood committee is going to turn from a volunteer organisation into a proper work unit with a salaried staff. She’s probably trying to increase her popularity in the compound, hoping it will help her gain a permanent position on the committee.

‘Old Wang’s son has opened a video room near my old opera company,’ says my mother. ‘Apparently, he makes three hundred yuan a day showing pirate videos.’

‘I doubt he’s making as much as that,’ Auntie Hao says. ‘Videos are old hat. Everyone’s switched to VCDs. The machines only cost four hundred yuan, and you can buy pirated VCDs for just five yuan, so who would want to pay three yuan to watch a film in his grubby video room? Anyway, he won’t be there much longer. That area is going to be demolished soon. They’re going to build a big commercial residential estate there.’

‘When do you think our compound will be demolished?’

‘I doubt they’ll pull this place down. Some of the blocks in this compound were built in the eighties, but most are 1950s Soviet-style buildings. They’re very sturdy. They could last another hundred years.’

‘I haven’t been to the cinema for ages. I don’t even watch television much. They always repeat the same programmes.’

‘Haven’t you been watching that new series,
The Incorruptible Director General
? It’s great. No one has dared make a drama about high-level corruption before. Even the provincial governor is shown to be a crook.’

‘The governor was criticising his son for corrupt practices, he wasn’t guilty of corruption himself.’

‘Well, you must have missed the last episode, then. It revealed that the governor was involved in the fraud too. The police took him away in handcuffs.’