Early the next morning, at five o'clock, he went to the hutong where Wang Qi lived, and checked out the number of the house. The nail-studded old-style gate was shut tight. It was quiet in the hutong, and no one was around, although the breakfast vendor at the entrance to the hutong was already open for business. He drank a bowl of very hot soy milk and ate a fried bun, fresh out of the oil, but still didn't see a familiar face. It was only after he had bought his second bowl of soy milk and eaten another fried bun, that Big Li arrived on his bicycle. He waved and called out to him. Big Li got off his bicycle and shook his hand like an old friend.
"You're back? We really need you," Big Li said, then went up close and said quietly, "Old Liu's been relocated, he's been hidden. When they get there, they won't find anyone."
Looking quite haggard, Big Li was obviously sincere; their former rivalry had suddenly vanished. Their relationship was very much like that of the children's gangs in the lanes and alleys, but with an additional element of loyalty. However, the hypocrisy that existed in comrade relationships was absent. In this chaotic world, gangs and groups had to be formed so that there was something for people to rely on.
Big Li added, "I've contacted a fire-fighting detachment, the chief is a good friend, if there's a fight, I'll only have to make a phone call, and a whole bunch of firefighters will be there in their fire engine.
They'll turn their hoses on what goes hard between the legs of those guys!"
At about six o'clock, Little Yu and six or seven youths from the workplace arrived at the entrance of the hutong, and they went up together to Wang Qi's gate where they stood leaning on their bikes and dangling cigarettes in their lips. Two small cars entered the hutong and stopped more than thirty meters away, they were cars from the workplace but no one got out. They confronted one another like this for four or five minutes, then the cars reversed, turned around, and drove off.
"Let's go in and see Comrade Wang Qi," he said.
Big Li hesitated and said, "Her husband's a reactionary."
"It's not her husband we're coming to see." He led them in.
The former bureau chief came out to greet them and said over and over, "Thank you for coming, comrades. Come in and sit down, come in and sit down!"
Wang Qi's husband, former theorist for the Party and now an anti-Party reactionary rejected by the Party, a small, thin, old man, acknowledged them with a nod. The doors of the two adjoining rooms had seals pasted on them, and there was nowhere for him to go, so he just paced back and forth, chain-smoking and coughing.
"Comrades, you probably haven't eaten. I'll go and make some breakfast," Wang Qi said.
"There's no need, we've just eaten at the entrance to the hutong. Comrade Wang Qi, we've only dropped in for a visit. Their cars have gone, and they won't be coming back," he said.
"Then let me make some tea for all of you…" She was a woman, after all; this former bureau chief held back tears as she quickly turned away.
Just like that, things inexplicably changed, and he was protecting the wife of an "anti-Party reactionary." When Wang Qi was in her job, she had cautioned him for having too close a relationship with Lin, but that pressure had dissipated long ago, and, compared with the string of events that had happened since, hardly counted as anything. Nevertheless, he was grateful to her for being lenient and not following up on his affair with Lin. Now, it could be said, he had repaid her.
While he, Big Li and the others drank tea made by the revolutionary cadre Wang Qi, the wife of a reactionary, they held a meeting on die spot and resolved to establish a dare-to-die group with those present forming the core members. If Danian's crowd tried to haul out and denounce their cadres, they would go forth and protect them.
Nevertheless, when armed fighting broke out, Wang Qi was hauled out by Danian's mob, and was to be denounced in the office. The corridors were crammed, and the office turned into a battlefield, with people jumping onto the desks and shattering the plate-glass covers on them. He couldn't retreat and was pushed inside, so he also stood on a desk to confront Danian.
"Drag him down, that fuckin' offspring of a bitch!" Danian ordered his mob of old Red Guards, not attempting to disguise their genealogical enmity.
He knew that if he showed any sign of weakness, they would set upon him and beat him up until they had maimed him. They would then dig up everything in his father's unsettled case to trump up a charge of class revenge against him. The people in his faction, inside and outside the office, were mostly gentle, frail, elderly bureaucrats and intellectuals, and most of the cadres were also from literary backgrounds. All of their families had problems, like his own. They certainly wouldn't be able to save him and moreover, wanted young people like him to come forward to oppose Danian's faction.
"Hey, listen! Danian, I'm warning you, we've got a gang, too, and the guys in our gang aren't short of fuel to burn. Any of you dare to make a move, and we'll serve up the whole lot of you on a platter tonight! You can believe us or not!" he, too, roared out.
When people become animals, their primitive instincts return; wolves and dogs both bare their teeth. He had to be menacing, his eyes had to look fierce, and he had to make this quite clear to the other party. He was a desperado who was capable of anything, and, at that time, he probably looked very much like a bandit.
There was the sound of fire-engine sirens down below. Big Li had got help just in time. The helmeted fire-fighting detachment, followed by the brother rebel group from the print factory in a truck, had arrived. They entered the building with a big flag in a show of might. Each faction had its own strategies, and this was how armed battles flared up in the universities, factories, and workplaces. If they were backed by the army then guns and cannons were deployed.
33
He first read it in a stenciled pamphlet. Mao had received the rebel-faction heads of the five universities of Beijing in the Great Hall of the People, and said, "You, little generals, have now committed errors." It was like the emperor saying to his generals that it was now time for them to step down. The "little general" Kuai Dafu, who had distinguished himself in purging old revolutionary warriors on behalf of the Commander-in-Chief, proving himself as a student leader, immediately understood the implications and broke into tears. The old man had used a poster at Peking University to ignite the flames of the Cultural Revolution, and now, to extinguish that mass movement he had initiated, he again started on a university campus. Half a million workers directed by Mao's security corps drove onto the campus of Tsinghua University.
That afternoon, on hearing this news, he rushed there and was witness to workers, led by army personnel, taking the solitary building opposite the gymnasium, the last stronghold of the earliest university rebel group, the Jinggang Mountain Militia. Worker propaganda teams, wearing red armbands, sat on the ground side by side, in circle upon circle around the building and the sports field, for a considerable distance. In the last rays of the setting sun, two big red banners were lowered from the windows of the top floor. Written on them in black were the words: "Plum blossoms flower in the snow unvanquished, Jinggang Mountain people are brave enough to ascend the scaffold!" Each of the words was larger than a window, and the banners stretching several floors down swayed in the wind. A group of forty or fifty army personnel and workers crossed the space in front of the building, went up the steps to the main door, then, after a while, finally went in and cut off the water and electricity. He mingled with the crowd of thousands of workers and onlookers watching in silence, and he could hear the two banners flapping in the wind.