Mou Sen walked into the tent. ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘The militants are taking over. Lin Lu is reorganising the Square without bothering to consult the Beijing Students’ Federation.’ He’d been given a transfusion in the emergency tent. His left arm was red and swollen.
‘I’ve just had lunch with our Southern University gang,’ I told him. ‘Wang Fei wants to set up a national student association.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Mou Sen said. ‘We can’t allow Lin Lu to monopolise things. He’s behaving like a tyrant.’
‘Wang Fei is a despot as well,’ Chen Di said, filing away a script that had just been broadcast.
Nuwa walked out from behind the amplifiers. ‘I wish you’d give up the hunger strike now,’ she said, glancing at Mou Sen. ‘There’s no need to starve yourselves to death. The Beijing Medical Rescue Centre has told us that another five hundred hunger strikers have passed out. Most of them are suffering from diarrhoea and dehydration. I really think it’s gone far enough now.’ I was surprised she hadn’t come to Wang Fei’s defence after Chen Di had called him a despot.
‘Broadcast that information at once,’ Mou Sen said. ‘If we don’t, the Voice of Qinghua will, or the Voice of the Student Movement as they now call themselves.’ Mou Sen was a very conscientious editor. He’d become much more cautious about what material he chose to air since he’d broadcast the false rumour about Deng Xiaoping’s resignation.
‘On the radio this morning it was reported that Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng visited some hunger strikers recovering in Xiehe Hospital,’ I said. ‘It appears the reformist wing and the hardliners are still engaged in a battle of strength.’
‘Hey, Old Fu, there’s a minibus parked over there,’ Chen Di said, returning to the tent after popping outside briefly. ‘I think it’s been donated to the students. Shall I have it brought over here? It might be useful to us.’
‘If we attach a loudspeaker to the roof, we could drive it around the Square and make broadcasts from it,’ said Mao Da.
‘Are you sure it’s not one of the buses Lin Lu brought into the Square?’ I asked. Lin Lu and Cheng Bing were still overseeing the arrival of the fifty public buses and getting them to park in neat rows along the north side of the Square.
‘No, it’s definitely a minibus,’ Chen Di said.
‘I’ll go and take a look at it in a minute.’ Old Fu stood up and straightened the cardboard sign hanging from his neck.
‘We broadcast the intellectuals’ 16 May Declaration, and now they’ve given us a 17 May Declaration,’ Mou Sen moaned, glancing down at the document Nuwa had just passed him. ‘We can’t keep broadcasting this stuff, Old Fu.’
‘Shut up!’ Nuwa shouted at the noisy diesel generator that was banging away in the corner. ‘No one can understand your peasant dialect. You make as much racket as that damn electric generator!’
‘You don’t seem to have any problem understanding Wang Fei’s peasant accent!’ Mou Sen said, smiling insolently.
‘At least it’s more intelligible than Yanyan’s,’ Nuwa said, having a dig at Mou Sen’s girlfriend. Nuwa was wearing a short skirt. I could see the maze of fine capillaries under the skin of her thighs. As she walked through the tent, I watched her smooth knees wobble like the breasts concealed inside her bra, and glanced at her elegant calves that tapered softly towards her fine ankles and red leather shoes.
‘This says “Down with Dictatorship!”’ Old Fu said, reading the page that Mou Sen had just given him. ‘I can’t let that be broadcast.’
‘It’s too much!’ Mou Sen cried, lighting another cigarette. ‘We’ve had false rumours about Deng Xiaoping resigning, the government stepping down. We must vet the scripts carefully. Who knows what kind of rubbish will turn up next?’ Then he looked at Nuwa and said, ‘Have you noticed that whenever we broadcast a poem, the Voice of the Student Movement plays the Internationale? It’s as though they’re deliberately trying to drown us out.’ Mou Sen had just been appointed the Beijing Students’ Federation’s deputy head of finance. All the expenses that Old Fu sanctioned now had to be approved by him and Sister Gao.
‘You shouldn’t smoke while you’re on hunger strike,’ said Nuwa, snatching the cigarette from Mou Sen’s fingers. The short goatee he’d grown gave him the air of a scholar.
‘I’ve never seen you try to stop Wang Fei smoking,’ he laughed. Nuwa took something from her pocket and stuffed it into his mouth. I guessed it was a sweet or chocolate drop. Girls always carry little snacks around with them, and enjoy giving them to boys they like. I wondered whether she was having an affair with Mou Sen behind Wang Fei’s back.
‘Our tape of the national anthem is much more stirring than their Internationale,’ Chen Di said. ‘They can’t defeat us. Hey, Mao Da’s shouting to us. Let’s go.’ He pulled Old Fu to his feet and dragged him out of the tent.
I felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over me and went outside for some fresh air. As I stared at the two wooden school desks of the makeshift reception centre at the Square’s north-east entrance, a Beijing resident walked up to me and said that her neighbour’s daughter, who’d come to the Square to support the students, had been run over by a car on her way home. She wanted to appeal for donations to help pay for the girl’s medical care. I wasn’t sure whether she was telling the truth or not, so I didn’t allow her into the broadcast station.
You watch the cerebrospinal fluid flow between the skull and the brain. The crooked microglia cells with quivering tails look like raindrops wriggling down branches of a tree.
I lay down on the ground, had a quick doze then returned to the tent.
‘Look at all those buses parked out there,’ Zhang Jie said as I walked in. ‘That’s Bai Ling’s hard work.’ He handed me the pile of paper he was holding. ‘I’ve only been in this tent for ten minutes, and look how many reports and statements I’ve been given.’ There was a tall girl standing next to him. I asked her what university she was from. She said she was a geology student, and had drawn a large map of the Square.
I told her I hadn’t met many geology students before. She was holding the rolled-up map in her hand. She looked like an Overseas Chinese tourist in her baseball cap, brown sunglasses and clean, freshly ironed clothes. She’d just had a shower. We all looked dirty and dishevelled in comparison. Everyone crowded round her to look at the map she’d drawn.
‘My name is Chuchu,’ she said, taking off her grey windcheater, revealing a low-necked cotton blouse underneath. When she leaned down, the gold cross of her necklace dangled over the map. ‘I thought that since this is a broadcast station, it must be the Square’s command centre too. I’m leaving the country in a couple of days, and I wanted to give you the map before I left. I spent two days drawing it. Look, this is the Beijing University camp, and this is the lifeline for the ambulances.’ She was taller than most of the boys in the tent.
‘You’ve put in so much detail!’ Mao Da said. ‘It will be very useful to us when we need to reorganise the Square. We must make sure it doesn’t fall into enemy hands.’
‘Pu Wenhua drew a map, but this one’s much more professional,’ Wang Fei said, leaning over.
‘But everything keeps changing,’ I said. ‘The buses have moved into this patch here, so this part needs to be redrawn.’
‘The provincial students’ camp won’t be moving, and I was told that the finance office and propaganda office on the Monument are pretty stable too,’ Chuchu said.
Big Chan patted Wang Fei’s shoulder. ‘This guy is the head of propaganda, and he’s just told me he wants to move his office over to the Museum of Chinese History.’
Chuchu glanced at Wang Fei, who was considerably shorter than her, and continued, ‘The map is of how things stand today. If there are any changes, you can amend it yourselves.’