Beijing Coma (102 page)

‘You’re an illegal resident here,’ a voice shouts. ‘Everyone else in this building has moved out. We’re telling you this for the last time. This building will be pulled down in the next three days. If you don’t move out now, you will have to take responsibility for the consequences.’

The pounding thuds of the piledrivers outside echo through the stairwell.

‘Who are you? Another bunch of relocation officers trying to pass yourselves off as government officials? I haven’t signed the demolition agreement. You have no right to order me to move out.’

‘I know you haven’t signed it. We’re from the demolition and relocation office. Every building has the odd stubborn resident like you. In the end, we have to remove them by force. If you resist us, you will not only forfeit any claim to compensation, you will also be breaking the law. The company has been granted a demolition licence by the public security bureau. When the building is demolished in three days’ time, the police will be present to make sure that everything goes smoothly.’

‘What a stench! It smells like a chicken hut in here. How can she bear to live like this?’

‘You businessmen are colluding with the government to oppress us ordinary citizens. But I’m not afraid of you! Go ahead and build your shopping centre, your public square, your Bird’s Nest stadium, but don’t push me out of my little nest.’

‘This is your last warning!’ They walk out without closing the door. I can hear bulldozers thud in the distance and walls topple to the ground.

The tanks and armoured personnel carriers lined up on the north side of the Square began rumbling towards us, followed by a huge mass of helmeted soldiers. My head was juddering so much I couldn’t see clearly.

Wang Fei, Tang Guoxian and I sat at the front of the crowd and watched the vehicles get into line, and the sea of troops behind them organise themselves into neat columns.

I regretted not carrying Mou Sen’s corpse out of the way. A tank had already flattened the emergency tent.

Hou Dejian and Zi Duo went to negotiate with the martial law troops. When they came back, the crowd cleared a path for them allowing them to return to the upper terrace.

Soon, the students’ loudspeakers came on. ‘This is Hou Dejian speaking. We’ve just had a private discussion with the army officials. They say that, as long as you all withdraw from the Square now, they will guarantee that no one will come to harm. The four of us entreat you to leave. You can’t fool yourselves any longer. If you don’t leave now, no one will come out of this alive . . .’ Although his voice wasn’t very loud, everyone could hear it. ‘I know that the students who are still here in the Square aren’t afraid of dying. But you can’t give up your lives like this, for nothing! There is still so much you can achieve . . .’ His hoarse cry was swallowed by the night.

Suddenly all the lights went out. The Square and the sky were pitch black. The only specks of light were from the fires still flickering in the distance.

‘Fuck it! If I’d known they’d do this I would have brought a torch.’

‘The bastards! They don’t have the guts to launch the crackdown with the lights on!’

The crowd became agitated. A few girls began to shriek in panic.

‘Fellow students! Please don’t stand up or move around!’ Old Fu shouted through a megaphone. ‘We don’t want anyone to get trampled on.’

I got up and shouted, ‘Student marshals, this is Dai Wei speaking, head of security. This is it. The moment has come. You must all stand up now and link arms, and protect the crowds behind you.’

At that moment, thousands of helmeted soldiers came running out from the Great Hall of the People in the west and moved towards us. Wu Bin jumped up, pulled out a petrol bomb from his jacket and unscrewed the top. ‘If anyone dares come near me we will go up in flames together! I am doing this to avenge Mou Sen’s death!’ Before he had a chance to reach for his lighter, Tang Guoxian pounced on top of him and grabbed his hands. I smelt the petrol spilling onto the ground.

‘Where’s the lighter?’ I said, trying to snatch the bottle from Wu Bin’s hand. Everyone around us panicked and pushed back into the crowd behind, trying to edge away from the smell of petrol.

In the darkness I heard a voice cry, ‘Dai Wei? Is there anyone called Dai Wei here?’

A student handed me a letter and said that someone at the back of the crowd had passed it down. The paper felt smooth between my fingers, but it was too dark for me to read what it said, so I put it in my pocket.

Tang Guoxian managed to grab the cigarette lighter and bottle from Wu Bin’s hands. Someone in the distance lit a fire. The red flames made my blood run faster.

‘Throw away your walkie-talkie, Wang Fei,’ I said, spotting a red light glinting on its metallic cover.

‘I’m not using it. Anyway, the batteries have run out.’

The national anthem blared out again from the loudspeakers on the Monument. ‘
Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves! With our flesh and blood, let us build a new Great Wall!
’ As we sang along, we began to relax a little. It occurred to me that most of the people who’d been shot by the Party since 1949 had shouted ‘Long live the Communist Party!’ when the bullets were fired. I wondered whether I, too, was going to die singing the national anthem beneath the national flag. I thought about A-Mei and wondered whether she was in the Square, and whether the letter I’d been handed was from her. I hoped she was sitting safely in a hotel room.

In the distance, we heard the Goddess of Democracy crash to the ground. Everyone yelled, ‘Down with Fascism!’ Red signal flares shot into the sky, and suddenly the troops lined up directly opposite us. A dozen soldiers lay down on their stomachs, pointed machine guns at us and placed their fingers on the triggers.

The muzzles were black holes. I knew that if they lit up, I would share the same fate as Mou Sen. My veins started throbbing. Everyone linked arms. Our limbs tensed as the roar of the tanks grew louder.

Hou Dejian cried through the loudspeakers, ‘Your lives are precious. Don’t throw them away needlessly!’

Then Old Fu shouted, ‘It’s too dark for a show of hands. Let’s take a voice vote. If you think we should stay in the Square, shout “stay”!’

‘Stay!’ The bellowing cries made the crowd seem united.

‘If you think we should go, shout “go”!’

‘Go!’ Although this response was softer, it was produced by more voices.

‘Why did you shout “stay” then shout “go”?’ Tang Guoxian asked Wang Fei, who was sitting beside him.

‘I just needed to shout,’ Wang Fei said. ‘I can’t hold my anger in any longer. Those fucking bastards!’

After the vote, Old Fu said, ‘The response for us to go was louder. So I now declare that we will withdraw from the Square! Everyone must file out through the south-east corner . . .’

The lights in the Square came back on. A second later, the machine guns opened fire, spraying rounds of bullets at the loudspeakers above us. The bullets screeched past our heads, hit the Monument’s obelisk and showered the cement ground with chips of stone. The students packed on the upper terrace screamed. Now that the loudspeakers had been silenced, the soldiers set to work. Some went to smash the shelters, others knelt down and aimed their rifles at us. The rest moved forward, skirting the spilt petrol that Tang Guoxian had just set light to.

Then a detachment of helmeted soldiers and armed police charged towards us wielding electric batons. They kicked and pushed their way to the top terrace and began driving everyone off the Monument. Soldiers with bayonets rushed up there too, and stared menacingly at the students climbing down to the lower terrace, prodding with their bayonets anyone who moved too slowly. They clubbed the students who were sitting on the steps. A few guys were beaten so badly their faces were covered in blood.

‘They’ve gone up to arrest the ringleaders,’ Wu Bin shouted. ‘Quickly, let’s go and protect Bai Ling.’ He and Tang Guoxian ran up the steps. Wang Fei followed behind. But without his glasses, he couldn’t see a thing, and he soon tripped and fell. I hurried over and pulled him to his feet. But as I stood up again, a soldier behind me knocked me to the ground . . .

It’s the evening of Christmas Day. My thoughts are racing about wildly, because at this very moment, on the other side of the world, Tian Yi is about to get married.

My mother packed her suitcase and left home again this afternoon. A migrant labourer has just brought her back. He found her lying on the ground fast asleep, clutching her suitcase to her chest, while the bulldozers and trucks roared around her.

The communal heating has been turned off. This building is like an empty rubbish bin standing in the snow.

The only warm patch of skin on my body now is the place over my heart where the sparrow is sitting. I think of the freezing concrete pipe in which I hid with Lulu. I think of my father picking up his violin as he lay on his deathbed and playing a hymn. Although two of the strings screeched a little, he played with great earnestness. The last few notes seemed to hover between earth and heaven.

It is morning in America now. Perhaps there will be bells ringing in the church. Tian Yi will wear a white wedding dress and have her photograph taken surrounded by bouquets of flowers. I’m sure she will be clutching a few petals in her palm. I once promised I would give her a house, and a garden with a reclining chair . . .

I wonder if any of our old classmates will be attending the wedding. Ke Xi left America a couple of years ago, and has moved to Taiwan. He’s opened two small snack bars that sell spiced lamb skewers. Han Dan moved to America after he was released from prison, and is doing a PhD in political science, and Shu Tong and Lin Lu are in Boston, so those three will probably be at the wedding. No one has heard from Wu Bin and Sun Chunlin since they sought asylum in France. Perhaps they’ve met up with Tang Guoxian. After his epic journey across Siberia, he found God, settled in Marseille, and is now a Catholic priest.

Wang Fei’s fate is the reverse of mine. His body is alive, but his spirit has been killed. When he’s released from the Ankang mental hospital, perhaps he can go back to playing basketball. Maybe, by then, he will have lost all capacity to feel pain.

The headlamps of a passing vehicle fill this cold flat with a snowy-white light. They are probably illuminating the half-dead streets, telegraph poles and the mounds of concrete slabs on the construction site as well, and making the eyes of the cats crouched on the steel girders shine gold. I remember the bright patches of unmelted snow that would dot the compound in late December. You could spot them no matter where they were hidden. Girls in thin jackets would stand shivering under the locust tree, stamping their feet to warm themselves up, letting out an occasional shriek that made the cold air shudder.

‘Look what I just found among last year’s bills. I wonder who sent it. There’s a foreign address on the back.’ My mother comes into my room, tosses an envelope onto the pile of junk at the bottom of my bed and walks out again.

My heart jumps. Perhaps it’s a letter from A-Mei. I think of the bloodstained letter lying in the box for my ashes and wonder what it might have said . . . On a mountain seventy li north grow red flowers that can cure sadness and nightmares . . . I want to go to that mountain. But what is its name, and where is it?

The noise of crashing walls and bricks moves closer and closer . . .

In the mounting chaos, the tanks and armoured personnel carriers moved closer, shaking the ground so much that my head bobbed up and down.

They continued to push forward, forcing the students to the east of the Monument to begin evacuating the Square. The remaining crowds at the base shrieked in panic and retreated back onto the Monument. Thousands of students were still packed on the lower terrace. There were loud screams as people were knocked over or trampled underfoot. A few students who were being crushed against the balustrades at the edge of the terrace climbed over and jumped off.

I watched tanks driving back and forth across the nylon tents in the north, and wondered whether the boy I’d seen writing out his will had escaped. I never found my backpack. The thermos cup that Ge You brought me from Shenzhen had presumably been flattened by now. Two foreign journalists took flash photographs as more students began to file out towards the south-east. A band of plain-clothes policemen dressed like reporters snatched the cameras from the journalists, twisted their arms back and dragged them off into the bushes. One of my shoes had been pulled off during the stampede. I took off the other one and flung it at the battalion of soldiers behind us. They were forcing us forward, striking us over the heads with the butts of their guns as though they were driving out a pack of dogs.

We continued south across the Square along a route lined with armed police. A student at the front of our column began shouting slogans through a loudspeaker. The crowd became restive. A voice yelled, ‘I’m not leaving. I want to die here in the Square!’ Another cried, ‘Someone help me! I can’t walk!’ The soldiers behind us were clutching guns, the butts pointing in the air, ready to attack us if we stepped out of line. Wang Fei glanced back and shouted, ‘Down with Fascism!’ and was immediately struck across the face. The butt of the soldier’s gun hit my shoulder as it swung past. A girl who was being kicked ferociously by an armed police officer screamed, ‘Mum, help me . . .’

At last we squeezed our way out of the encirclement. As we walked away, we broke into the chorus of the Internationale, glanced back at the Square and flashed the victory sign. The noise of gunfire and screaming seemed to light up the sky.

One guy bravely unfurled a banner that said
ALL DICTATORS WILL PERISH
! I too felt my fear slip away as we moved further from the Square.