‘That’s probably the last trip it will make tonight,’ Wen Niao said. ‘It might get to the hospital, but I doubt it will be allowed back again.’
‘This guy here was my best friend. The girl who got shot is his girlfriend — no, his wife.’ My mouth was so dry, I could hardly speak. I stared at the blood on Mou Sen’s hair, which I’d cut myself, and thought about how, a few moments before, he’d been alive and in love. I couldn’t understand how he could be dead so suddenly.
‘That wound in her thigh was deep. It was haemorrhaging badly. She won’t survive.’ After Wen Niao said this, she turned and pushed her way into the Red Cross tent.
Blood rushed to my head. Everything went dark. I looked down again at Mou Sen. His red eyeball gleamed with reflected light. I crouched down and rubbed his chest, trying to shake him awake. ‘Are you really dead? It’s too much, Mou Sen. I won’t let you die like this.’ I opened the cigarette pack. There were still two cigarettes inside.
I sat down beside him. The glint in his eye was strange and unfamiliar. He looked nothing like my father did when he died. His face, teeth, hair, neck and goatee were covered in blood. I had his blood and Nuwa’s blood all over my hands.
My mind went blank. I didn’t know what to think any more or where to look.
Inside the emergency tent, the nurses were packing away the medical supplies into cardboard boxes and getting ready to carry out the wounded. They pushed everyone with minor injuries out of the tent and said, ‘Hurry up and leave the Square!’
On Fajiu Mountain lives a bird with a white beak and red claws. It is the reincarnation of Emperor Yandi’s daughter who drowned in the East Sea. It cries out ‘Jingwei, jingwei’, so people call it the jingwei bird. Every day, it picks up twigs and stones from the mountain and drops them into the East Sea, trying in vain to fill it up.
A student who’d just had his arm bandaged ran towards the troops shouting, ‘You’ll pay for this, you murderers!’ I grabbed him and said, ‘Go back to the Monument, my friend, and tell everyone what’s happened. Hurry!’
The government loudspeakers overhead were still droning the same announcements. ‘A serious counter-revolutionary riot has broken out in Beijing. Thugs have stolen the army’s ammunition and set fire to army trucks. Their aim is to destroy the People’s Republic of China. We must launch a resolute counter-attack…’ An armoured personnel carrier careered past the Great Hall of the People, knocking over a man pushing a bicycle. I left Mou Sen’s corpse, ran over to where the man had fallen and helped the crowd rebuild the roadblock that the armoured carrier had rammed through. A few workers tossed petrol bombs onto the vehicle’s roof.
It came to a large blockade further down the road that it was unable to breach. Its engine roared as it struggled in vain to push through it. A mob raced over and attacked it with more Molotov cocktails. I spotted a quilt lying on the ground, so I picked it up, ran over to the vehicle and tossed it onto the bottles burning on the roof. The quilt immediately caught fire. A few moments later, the armoured carrier finally managed to break through the roadblock and escape west down Changan Avenue, the quilt on its roof still blazing. Marshals from the Workers’ Federation chased after it, shouting, ‘What the fuck are you doing driving into people like that?’ Others ran over with metal rods which they stuck into the tracks, bringing the vehicle to a halt once more. Soon hundreds of people surrounded it and attacked it with metal rods and wooden sticks. Some people even punched the metal sides with their fists. I too went over and kicked it a few times, but the thick smoke pouring from its exhaust pipe made my eyes water, so I ran back to the middle of the Square. Bullets were still arcing through the night sky, accompanied by a continuous sound of gunfire.
Just as I was about to make my way through the rows of nylon tents, a man walked up to me, pulled me aside and told me he was an undercover agent. He urged me to tell the students to leave the Square immediately, as the soldiers were about to move in and clear it by force, and would kill anyone who resisted them. To prove his identity, he pulled a walkie-talkie from his pocket. It was a model used only by the government’s security force.
‘What difference will it make if we leave now or get driven out in a couple of hours?’ I said blankly, then walked off to fetch my backpack from my tent. But when I got there, my mind was so muddled, I forgot what I was looking for. I saw a student in a tent opposite mine scribbling into his journal by torchlight. ‘The troops are coming to clear the Square!’ I shouted. ‘Hurry up and get out of here!’
‘I’m writing my will,’ he said without looking up. Then he switched off his torch and lay down on his camp bed.
‘You will — you will regret this!’ A fire was raging in my head. I couldn’t think straight.
Five hundred li downriver, you come to Mount Plenty. The River Li rises from the foothills and flows west to empty into the Yellow River. Poisonous fish inhabit its waters. If a man eats them, he will die.
My mother is searching for something again. She’s in her bedroom. She always seems to be looking for something or other, but what she is really looking for is herself. She no longer turns on the radio, so most of the noises I hear now are either from her or from the bulldozers which are edging closer and closer to our building.
She must be leaning down. She kicks away a pile of plastic bags. I can hear there’s a swelling at the base of her oesophagus. It lies at the opening to her stomach like a rotten potato and gives her breath a smell of sickness.
She survives on a diet of raw cucumber, celery and small snacks that are sold wrapped in cellophane. She often wakes up in the middle of the night, groaning with stomach pain, then turns on the television and watches it until dawn.
The nurse who comes to bring me medicine every week pushes a thermometer into my mouth and says, ‘Why don’t you open the windows and tidy this flat up a little? It smells worse than a public toilet in here.’
‘I don’t want the sparrow to fly out,’ my mother answers.
‘No wonder no one wants to come round here. You really are a strange woman. You have this vegetable to keep you company, and now you want a sparrow as well!’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘There’s a new drug you should buy for him. Our clinic has just received a batch. It’s synthesised from fresh placenta cells, and helps stimulate cell regeneration. You inject it straight into the blood. As a regular customer, you can have it at a discount rate of just two hundred yuan a box.’
‘I don’t think I’ll bother. There’s nothing much wrong with him. All the tests he’s been having these last years show that his condition is stable.’
‘He’s your own son. What’s two hundred yuan to you? What a miser you are! You can’t be short of money. All the residents of this compound have made a fortune from the demolition compensation fees.’
‘Huh, even if I were to get 200,000 yuan, I couldn’t buy another flat around here. The smallest flats in the new commercial block round the corner cost at least three times that much.’
‘Well, you can rent then. You’ll have enough money to cover the rent bills for the rest of your life.’
‘No I won’t. Everyone in this building has done well, apart from me. Because I took early retirement, my work unit refuses to give me a property ownership certificate, so I’m only eligible for tenants’ compensation, which is a tenth of what everyone else is getting. I’ve told the Hong Kong developers that unless they pay me the full amount, I won’t budge.’
‘They’ve daubed the word “demolish” all over this building. Most of the shops and restaurants outside have closed down. It’s like a ghost town. I don’t want to come here again. Even during the day, I feel frightened walking down that street. I’ll come next week, but if you want any more medicine for your son after that, you’ll have to visit the clinic.’