‘Huh! Those drug companies send salesmen to every hospital to bully doctors into prescribing their drugs. They work on commission. If you go to hospital these days, the doctors won’t let you leave until you’ve bought several hundred yuan’s worth of medicine.’
‘I’ve told many pharmaceutical research institutes about Dai Wei’s condition, but unfortunately, as soon as they find out he was involved in the Tiananmen Square protests, they refuse to help.’
Wen Niao opens her case and prepares a syringe of the drug she’s brought today.
‘You’re so kind, Nurse Wen,’ my mother says, walking in from the kitchen. ‘The nurses who came before weren’t nearly as diligent as you. Here, have a cup of tea. It’s freshly brewed. Whatever happens, I insist you have some lunch before you leave. I’ve bought some garlic shoots and pork ribs especially.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, sliding the needle into my vein. ‘It still seems so strange that I met your son in the Square, and here I am seven years later, looking after him. It must have been fate. I even saw him in the early hours of 4 June. He helped me lift dead bodies into the ambulance. Why did he have to end up with a bullet in the head? It’s so unfair…’
~ ~ ~
‘So you were in the Square that night?’ my mother asks, taken aback.
‘I was in the emergency tent, near the Goddess of Democracy. I saw students being killed right in front of me. There were corpses under Mao’s portrait, near the flagpole on the north side of the Square, and in front of the Museum of Chinese History. I managed to get a lift on an ambulance that was taking casualties to the Children’s Hospital. I was relieved to leave the Square. But when I walked into the hospital’s emergency room, I saw pools of blood everywhere. I had blood up to my ankles… The colleagues of mine who remained in the Square were herded into an enclosure in front of the Museum of Chinese History, and were only released at seven in the morning. They were all sent to work in other cities after that, to ensure they didn’t speak to any foreign journalists.’
‘Did the police interrogate you afterwards?’ They’re sitting on the sofa now.
‘They wanted me to give them the emergency tent’s registration book. They came to my flat many times. One of the officers even became my boyfriend for a while.’
‘A boy called Wang Nan was shot during the crackdown. The soldiers hid his body in a flower bed just east of the Zhongnanhai government compound. But the grave was so shallow that his body started poking up from the soil a few days later. Fortunately he was wearing an army uniform, so the authorities assumed he was an injured soldier. Otherwise, they would have sent his body to a secret crematorium, and his mother would never have found out what happened to him.’
They both fall silent. Wen Niao takes a sip of tea. I can smell jasmine in the steam rising from her teacup and in the air she exhales. I inhale, and feel her breath enter my lungs.
‘You forgot your watch here last time.’ My mother goes into the kitchen. ‘I’ll just fry this up. It won’t take long.’
‘I’m always mislaying that watch,’ Wen Niao says, walking into my room. ‘I’m so scatterbrained.’
I hear her swallow. I know she’s looking at me, scrutinising me as she would a caged rabbit in her research lab.
She takes my blood pressure, inspects the skin on my legs then carefully removes a few flakes of skin from behind my ears and places them in a screw-top jar to analyse later.
I hear her breathe in and out as she flicks through some sheets of paper. The air is as smooth as silk.
Her fingers move over my chest. They are warm, as warm as the breath she exhales. Her nails press into my skin for moment, then she pulls her hand away. My penis immediately stiffens. I want her to touch me again. She’s the first girl since Tian Yi to show any concern for me.
She notices my erection, lifts the sheet and observes it for some time. ‘It seems this vegetable has quite a healthy sexual appetite,’ she whispers.
I wish it would go down.
Then she says into my ear, ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll wake up one day. The drugs I’m giving you are imported. Do you hear me, wooden man? And I’ve told your mother lots of things she can do to speed up your recovery. I looked after many coma patients during my internship.’
This is the sixth time you’ve visited me, Wen Niao. One time you came on a Saturday. You said you hadn’t anything else to do that weekend.
‘You were very handsome seven years ago. There was always a crowd of people milling around you. I never dared look you straight in the eye.’
And I remember that your face was similar to Tian Yi’s: oval, and lightly freckled, but with thicker eyebrows and a higher-bridged nose.
‘At least you’re better off than those students who were sent to the Martial Law Headquarters and tortured so badly they went insane. They’re the ones I feel sorry for.’
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.
All the windows are shut. You swelter in the heated flat like a half-steamed fish.
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.