She was surprised at how very clear it all remained in her own memory. She had taken the letter that day to a friend, Fang, who ran the Rule of Law journal. He, in turn, took the risky step of informing someone very high up in the government via an internal memo. The official scribbled an instruction on it, the horrors that Zheng had endured at Number Two prison came to an end and he was transferred to the prison ward of a hospital on the outskirts of the city. She actually took Fang to meet Zheng’s parents who were most grateful for his help. But memories fade, and the whole episode became for them something ‘not worth raking up’. Tianyi found it chilling.
And so she came to realize that total amnesia had afflicted an entire people. The Chinese were so apathetic that they had simply decided not to pass judgment, to forget the disastrous decade of the Cultural Revolution. It had destroyed their lives, but they innocently imagined that this history would never be repeated. Yet it was repeated in 1989, on ground already soaked with blood, just because the perpetrators had escaped justice the first time round.
She was overwhelmed by her longing for Zheng, and wept until she had no more tears to cry.
19
One day, Xiao’ou reappeared in Tianyi’s life. It was an unusually bright Beijing morning when someone knocked at the door. In those days, friends rarely phoned in advance, they just turned up. Tianyi opened the door, to see a tall figure silhouetted against the light. The sun’s rays made the hairs of his head look almost transparent, and before she saw his face, she knew it was Xiao’ou. She was exhausted, not having slept well, and it showed in her puffy face. Worst still, she had not had time to wash her face and comb her hair. She looked a mess, and felt in no state to welcome an old friend, even one she had not seen for so long.
Xiao’ou did not seem to notice, though. He spoke excitedly about his recent doings, about the terrible night of 4th June, when by some lucky fluke he made his escape from the Square, and about the terrible scenes he had witnessed there.
‘You’re a friend of Zheng, aren’t you?’
‘Who told you?’ she asked quietly.
‘Fang.’ Then, after a pause: ‘A bunch of friends are going on an outing to Huairou County tomorrow. Do you want to come?’
‘Who’s going?’
‘Fang, for starters. Everyone wants to know what’s happened to Zheng, and do what they can to help.’ That was how she found out that Zheng and Xiao’ou were friends. Small world!
The next day, she dressed carefully, putting on a blue-and-white batik skirt, tying her hair into a ponytail and applying a little makeup. Then she called goodbye to Lian and set off.
When they were in the minibus, she realized that this was a circle of people she had never met before. Such friendship groups had flourished after the Cultural Revolution ended, the more pretentious ones calling themselves ‘Salons’. She always stuck by her friends — those she got to know through Zheng at the beginning of the eighties were like her family. But after June 1989, they had scattered, some going abroad, others taking refuge wherever they could. For Tianyi, a life swept bare of friends was no life at all so she was pleasantly surprised to be introduced to new ones today. You only had to exchange a couple of sentences in Beijing to get a general idea whether someone could become a friend. There was a sort of secret language that told you immediately.
Only one friend from the old days was on the bus, Zheng’s ex-girlfriend, Xi. The famous boyfriend Tianyi had heard so much about, a rock singer, was there too. Rock stars were then as rare as the morning star in the sky and Tianyi was curious to talk to him, but he seemed to have nothing interesting to say. Xi, however, was as bubbly as ever, and full of endless questions, and the two women spent the trip catching up.
Fang was a respected figure within this circle of friends. After dinner, he called just a few of them, including Tianyi, to his room, to talk about Zheng. Everyone was talking about Zheng; all over China, he had become a hero. They were greedy for news, for any titbits of information about him: how was he getting on? What was he doing? Tianyi sensed their eagerness and found herself telling these people every detail of everything she knew, from beginning to end, because she was so anxious for him to get help.
Tianyi was the star of the show that evening. Everyone clustered around her. They seemed especially interested in Zheng’s wife Yiyi’s dramatic performance in court, and Tianyi thought again how in China there was no way of protecting ones secrets. Even those details she regarded as most private had somehow got out. For instance there were rumours that, since Zheng’s imprisonment, Yiyi had been arrested for sleeping with foreigners, that Yiyi had stolen foreign aid funds to buy herself a silver fox coat … But Tianyi had not the slightest interest in this sort of gossip, not only because it might affect Zheng adversely, but also because she found it all too boring. When she thought of Zheng shut away in lonely isolation in that dreadful prison, she felt thoroughly disillusioned at outsiders’ prurient fascination with chewing over his private life. They were as bloodthirsty as the father who fed his son a blood-soaked bun in Lu Xun’s story Medicine! Of course, they meant well, and Fang had been a huge help to Zheng, as she knew quite well. But even though it showed everyone was interested, it did nothing to raise her spirits.
She was secretly observing Xiao’ou. He was still extremely attractive but seemed in some way to have changed, become even more extrovert. When they used to swim in the reservoir, he seemed to make a point of strutting around in front of her in his swimming briefs, showing off his imposing physique and, especially, his luxuriant growth of chest hair. She had not enjoyed his behaviour. It reminded her uncomfortably of a Mister Universe. Her reaction was to cover up from head to toe, even if she did pour with sweat on a hot day, and to refuse to take off her long-sleeved shirt, thus successfully diverting the men’s gaze to Xi’s body instead.
But no … it was not that Xiao’ou had changed. It was that she had simply not seen him clearly in the past. He was someone who liked to brag about how splendid he would be in a disaster. He might have made a Hermann Hesse, but Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King was clearly beyond him, never mind Jesus Christ. It all made him the polar opposite of Zheng.
She felt now that it was even more difficult to divert their attention from herself than to attract it. It was an art apparently and she was no more than a beginner. For whatever reasons, the feelings she had once had for Xiao’ou, had evaporated. That was probably the only good thing that came out of this trip to Huairou County.
At work, Qiang was looking grimmer by the day. It never occurred to Tianyi that he was not an iron-man but a flesh and blood human being, in the prime of life, strong and vigorous, deprived of his wife and child (they had gone to live abroad), and in a position that gave him few opportunities for diversion. He had two choices: to grit his teeth and curb his desires or spend the midnight hours jerking off compulsively. Never in her wildest dreams did Tianyi imagine that she was the object of his masturbatory fantasies. So by day he scowled furiously at her, as if she had pried into some unspeakable secret of his private life.
Fortunately, Qiang had his decent side; he took pride in being a man of honour and principles, and putting his work responsibilities first. Looking very serious, he entrusted her with inviting three well-known avant-garde authors to the company, to sketch out the plot of a new film. At the same time, he got someone else to do the same with other authors, who wrote rather less highbrow stories.