‘All right, we’ll stay in the Square,’ Lin Lu said, forgetting that only Bai Ling could make this decision. ‘Make an announcement asking everyone to form a human wall. There are 10,000 of us here now. If the soldiers want to drag us out one by one, it will take them at least until dawn.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘The north-eastern corner of the Square has been sealed. When the troops arrive from the west, they will launch the crackdown.’ I still didn’t dare mention that Mou Sen had been killed.
‘Yes, we must leave,’ Zi Duo concurred, rising feebly to his feet. ‘I don’t care whether the information you received about Zhao Ziyang is true or not. You have no right to put the students’ lives at risk!’
‘This discussion is for members of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters only, Sir,’ Old Fu said. ‘You aren’t entitled to take part.’
‘We’ve spent the last three weeks debating whether to leave or stay,’ Shao Jian said, his usually mild voice rising in pitch. ‘We must come to a decision now!’
‘Hou Dejian and I want to speak to the martial law troops,’ Zi Duo said. ‘We’ll ask them to give you time to vacate the Square.’
‘You must return to the campuses and keep the flame of your movement burning,’ Hou Dejian said, walking over. ‘You can’t just sit here and wait for them to arrest you.’
‘If you go and negotiate with the army, you’ll be on your own,’ Old Fu said. ‘You can’t speak on behalf of the Headquarters.’
‘The army has already pulled down the Workers’ Federation’s tent,’ Tang Guoxian said, squeezing over to us with Zhang Jie. ‘The north side of Changan Avenue is packed with martial law troops now.’
I pulled Tang Guoxian to the side and whispered in his ear: ‘Mou Sen’s been killed.’
‘I heard he was hit by a bullet and was taken to the emergency tent. He’s dead? My God . . .’ His expression froze in disbelief.
I looked over at Tiananmen Gate and saw thousands of soldiers pouring out from the black arch beneath Chairman Mao’s portrait. Reflected firelight flickered across their metal helmets. The fires blazing in the distance looked like funeral pyres burning in a graveyard.
After the god Zi You was killed by the emperor, he turned into a maple tree. A red snake lies coiled beneath the tree, keeping watch over it.
‘. . . I beg you to sign the contract. I have an invalid wife at home who’s waiting for me to bring her some medicine.’
‘I’ll only agree to move if you give me the same compensation my neighbours received. Why should I be punished for my son’s mistake? I’ve devoted my life to the Party, and now that I’m old and frail, they want to take away my flat. So much for their so-called “Three Represents” policy . . .’
‘It’s not easy being a relocation officer. I only earn a base salary of three hundred yuan a month. I have to rely on my bonuses to get by. If you sign this contract, my job will be done and I’ll leave you in peace . . .’
‘You’re wasting your time. I’ll never sign it. If they attempt to drag me out of here, I’ll throw myself off Tiananmen Gate, or I’ll jump out of this window.’ When my mother’s mind is clear, her voice becomes much louder.
‘It’s not like the old days. The government won’t forcibly evict you. But think things through. If you stay here over winter, how will you survive without water, electricity or heating? And besides, the Hong Kong developers have promised to offer you a reward if you agree to move out in time . . .’
‘You’d better go now. My phone is ringing . . .’ She pushes the officer out of the door, then answers the phone. ‘Hello! Really? That’s wonderful. Congratulations! . . . The compound is being pulled down. All the roads have been blocked off. Most of the residents have moved out . . . I don’t know yet. The new flats around here are so expensive . . .’ I don’t hear the phone click after my mother hangs up. She probably hasn’t put the receiver down properly. I hear her mutter, ‘What’s wrong with that girl? She’s about to marry her foreign fiancé, but she’s still thinking about you. That’s so bourgeois!’
That must have been Tian Yi on the phone. She will be marrying her boyfriend this Christmas.
When my mother leaves the flat these days, she often ends up sitting outside for hours. If anyone asks her what she’s doing, she’ll say, ‘I’m going to the airport. I’m just waiting for a car to pick me up . . .’ In the afternoon, she’ll forget what she did in the morning. She has locked herself out of the flat several times. She tells people she is going to move to England, and is just waiting for her visa to be issued. She often mixes up Master Yao and my father, and asks why every man she’s known has ended up in jail. She says that her dead father’s soul has laid a curse on her.
Sometimes she comes over to me and says, ‘I’m going to look at a flat. It’s got three bedrooms and two bathrooms . . .’ Before she leaves, she makes me a bowl of maize congee and sprinkles some dried shredded pork over the top. Then she inserts the feeding tube into my nose, attaches the funnel to the end and pours the congee in. When the bowl’s empty, she mutters, ‘I know you’re only pretending to be dead,’ or ‘I’m going away with your father now. He’s taking me to America to meet his old college friends . . .’ Sometimes she says very softly, ‘Look at your skin. It’s much smoother. That’s a sign you’re going to come back to life again soon, my son . . .’ Then she says goodbye and leaves.
A few minutes later, she’ll be on the street corner outside, sitting on her packed suitcase, staring at the trucks driving through the demolition site loaded with discarded door frames, window frames and concrete flights of steps. She always puts on a lot of make-up before she leaves. I imagine it’s the same make-up she wore when she sang on the stage. She liked to draw two fine black arches a little above where her eyebrows should be.
My mother has a quick doze on the sofa. When she wakes up, she turns off the television then switches it on again. It’s another programme examining the proposed logos for Beijing’s Olympic bid. She tries to shut the door to my room, but there’s too much stuff in the way. Like me, the flat has become a corpse that’s rotting from within.
She whisks off some nail clippings, or crumbs, from the sofa, then goes into her bedroom. For some reason, she shuts the door behind her. She hasn’t done that for years.
You move through the fleshy layers of streets and buildings outside, watching tiny microbes darting restlessly back and forth.
Now that the telephone line has been cut, the flat feels dead. My mother dials the same number again and again, until she finally guesses what has happened.
The last call she received before the line was disconnected was from Mao Da. He said that Liu Gang was detained for working in Beijing without a residency permit. A few days after he was released, he got run over by a police car and died in hospital. He also told her that Wang Fei has been arrested and locked up in an Ankang mental asylum. When she heard this, my mother said, ‘A mental asylum? How nice. I wouldn’t mind going in for a bit of treatment myself . . .’
I hear her brush her hair. It’s caked in so much dust and lacquer that it crackles when the bristles move through it.
The dust and mist outside have tinted the sky yellow. All those solid, fifty-year-old buildings, all those layers of red brick, are crumbling to the ground one by one. My body is being demolished and rebuilt as well. Since my gastric glands stopped secreting digestive enzymes, cells have been flooding in my stomach as though it were a public square. My redundant sperm has been moved into my bone marrow. The cone cells on my neglected retinas have relocated to a newly developed district in my brain’s frontal lobe, and have reorganised themselves in such a way that I am now able to sense the world as a bat might do. My superfluous jejunum has also been repositioned. While this commotion takes place inside me, I remain motionless, flat on my back on the iron bed.
The old locust tree outside our building was bulldozed to the ground yesterday. It’s probably lying amid the rubble now, covered in grey dust, or perhaps a truck has already taken it away. In my childhood, that tree was my only safe haven. My mother will soon don her red-and-yellow baseball cap, then take her gold ring from her drawer and slip it on her finger. She will then cover the ring with her right hand, to hide it from any thieves that might be prowling outside.
My body has become much more efficient. Through a process of energy conversion, I can now survive for a week on just one glass of milk. My skin has learned to absorb as many ultraviolet rays from one small beam of sunlight as most people absorb during an entire summer. My mother, however, is getting stiffer and frailer by the day. She seems to be slipping into a trance.
She switches on the television. ‘. . . St Mary’s Hospital in Hong Kong has begun to use deep brain stimulation of the thalamus to treat Parkinson’s disease. The symptoms of Parkinson’s include stiffness and rigidity, a blank facial expression . . .’ She quickly turns up the volume. ‘. . . The procedure involves screwing a metal frame to the head, inserting fine needles into the brain to locate the thalamus, then drilling a hole about the width of a finger into the skull . . .’ She turns the volume right down again and mutters, ‘Huh! As if that will do any good!’
‘Huizhen! It’s me – Granny Pang. Will you let me in?’
‘What a terrible sandstorm we’re having,’ my mother says, opening the door.
‘It’s not sand, it’s dust from the demolition site. Look. The stairwell is covered in it. The workers should sprinkle water on the ground to keep the dust under control . . . I’ve come up to tell you that I’m moving out this afternoon. I’ll come back and visit you, when I have time.’
‘I still don’t know where I’m moving to . . .’ When her mind is clear, she forgets how she often talks about moving to England or America.
‘You’re the last person left in this building. You’d better hurry up and move out. They’re going to cut off the electricity soon.’
The sparrow walks up the side of my chest and nuzzles itself into my armpit, to shelter itself from the cold draught. It has lost so many of its feathers that all it can do is skip and scurry over my body. My mother has picked it up a few times and taken it to the window, but just as she’s on the point of throwing it out, she always changes her mind and says, ‘I’ll let you wait until my son wakes up, then you can fly into the sky together . . .’
‘I haven’t dared open my window,’ Granny Pang continues. ‘There’s so much dust out there. They’re working overtime to make sure the project is completed before the millennium. It’s been so noisy at night, I haven’t slept a wink.’
‘They can pull everything down and cut off the electricity, I don’t care! I’ve brought out my old charcoal stove so I can cook on that if I need to. I will stand up to them. Even a rabbit can bite if it’s pushed into a corner.’
‘To be fair, we should be pleased that the government is finally building new flats for us . . .’
‘Auntie Hao from the neighbourhood committee came over yesterday with Officer Liu and tried to persuade me to move out. But I’m not budging. I’m like the turtle in the fable, which swallows a lead weight when someone comes to remove it from its pond. I will stand firm.’
‘A Bodhisattva appeared before me yesterday. It looked just like your Guanyin figurine. How do you explain that?’
‘Old Yao said that during the early stages of cultivation, the gods that appear to you are as small as a grain of rice, but they grow larger the longer you practise. If you saw a Bodhisattva as large as my figurine, it shows that you have almost reached the stage of Buddha yourself.’
‘Really? That means I’ll be able to fly into the sky soon . . . The Falun paradise is superior even to the Buddha Realm. It’s a land of eternal spring, with golden mountains and silver streams . . .’
Have I now explored all 5,370 mountains of
The Book of Mountains and Seas
? On my travels through my body, I’ve discovered that all the wonders described in the book exist within me: the peaks and marshes, the buried ores, the trees that grow in the clouds and the birds with nine heads. I know now that to reach the soul, you must travel backwards. But only people who are asleep have time to tread that backward path. Those who are awake must hurtle blindly onwards until the day they die . . .
Dusk is falling. In the darkness, my mother removes the bedpan from between my thighs and empties it into the toilet hole. She hardly ever cleans me any more. Since Gouzi the electrician made this specially shaped bedpan, she hasn’t had to wash any of my sheets and blankets.
She’s taken to eating her meals in the dark. She seldom turns on the light to read a book or a newspaper. I imagine that the ten volumes of
Mysteries of the World
she used to treasure so much, and keep neatly lined up on the cabinet are now buried under a mound of plastic bags. The photograph of my father playing the violin is probably still hanging on the wall above them. Those objects authenticate my memories. They will survive in my mind, whether they still exist or not, but everything else will slip away.
The sparrow chirps softly. When it’s asleep, it clings to me with its claws and warms my skin. It should be living in the sky now, flying so high that people have to lift their heads to see it.
My bed shakes as the piledrivers outside ram steel bars deep into the ground. The thuds seem to pound in time with my heartbeat. I remember the heartbeats of A-Mei and Tian Yi. Everyone else seems distant from me. The hole where my left kidney used to be begins to tremble. Perhaps my left urethra is full of urine, or a few drops of blood have dripped into my bladder. I feel a change taking place. My organs seem to have received some secret signal. They appear to be preparing for something – either death or a return to consciousness . . . My thoughts go back to Wen Niao and the bliss I felt that afternoon she made love to me.
I hear people climbing up the stairwell. They’re not removal men or migrant labourers. These footsteps are light. They ascend to the third-floor landing and come to a halt outside our front door.