‘You must get strong, Pingping. I want to see you dance again. The police are investigating the case, I am sure they will find your attacker. It is a miracle you survived. The nurse said the knife scraped past your spinal cord, one millimetre to the left and you would have been an invalid for the rest or your life.’
A plump nurse walks in. I ask if she can help me find a vase for the flowers.
‘Have a look in the rubbish bins in the backyard.’ She unhooks the empty blood bag and replaces it with a new one.
I poke through the bins with a long wooden stick. They are filled with rotten fruit peel, soiled dressings, pill bottles, broken strip lights. At last I find an empty fruit jar, but the lid is stuck firm. I borrow some pliers from the shoe menders across the road and manage to prize it off.
I stuff the flowers into the jar and place it on the bedside table, but she cannot see it there, so I pull out a stem and balance it on the oxygen canister, and slowly her eyes redden. I watch her gaze pass through the wires and machines. Five months ago she fixed the same gaze on me and asked, ‘Are you happy? Are you happy?’
What could I say? I wanted to say, ‘No, I am not happy, I am tired of life.’ I wanted to say, ‘I don’t know whether I am happy or not.’ And I wanted to say: ‘You, Lu Ping, sitting here on my sofa, the way you speak, the way you move — you are happiness, a happiness I can reach out and touch. But I don’t believe in love, I don’t believe in myself. I can only touch you in my poem, from a far distance.’
I leave the hospital and take off down the large noisy street. I run from Yongan Road to Temple of Heaven. At Chongwai Boulevard I turn left and run to the drink store underneath Jianguomen flyover. The cement road overhead drones under the weight of moving trucks. A song blares from a cassette player resting on a biscuit tin. ‘Have I changed the world, or has the world changed me? Same old yesterday, same old yesterday. .’
Lu Ping was born in the south, grew up in the Beijing Dance School and became the star of the Central Ballet Company. There was always a crowd of young men waiting for her outside the stage door. She was too beautiful for this world, so someone stabbed her in the back. Even if she survives, she will never dance again. I put down the bottle of fizzy orange and set off down Chaoyangmen Boulevard. The road seems to soften underfoot, the lines of buses and pedestrians begin to thin. I run to the corner of Dongsi Tenth, pause at the crossing, then race down Nanxiao Lane. Coal dust hovers in the evening air, it clings to my throat as I breathe. I usually wear a cotton face mask on my morning jogs. The only place where the air is clean is in the Sanlitun embassy district.
I don’t know if I love Lu Ping or what I could do for her. I see the knife enter her back. I see her weak and helpless face. Then I see myself standing beside her, blank and numb.
I turn round and run towards the Workers’ Stadium. Ahead of me the evening sky is trapped between two red walls. The road stretches towards it. This time tomorrow, I will have left this city behind.
2. Dust Storm
Emerging from the Gate of Hell
I board the steam train to Urumqi and watch the red walls of Beijing slip away. This time I am not travelling as a Party journalist on assignment to the provinces. I have left my job and packed a change of clothes, a notebook, two bars of soap, a water bottle, a torch, a compass, two hundred yuan, a wad of rice coupons, my camera and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. My old life recedes into the distance and my heart races with the train as we rattle towards China’s far west.
The map of China on my lap resembles a chicken, its head pointing east and its feet in the south. The train departed from the neck and will travel six thousand kilometres to the tail. I want to go as far away as possible, right to the western border. The neat fields outside the window flick past like pages of a book.
The man sitting opposite waves a cigarette at me. ‘Want a smoke, comrade?’
‘No thanks.’ I don’t want to speak to him. I hate the way his left hand keeps tapping the lid of the ashtray on the wall. His teeth are as grey as his shirt collar. The little girl beside him is cracking sunflower seeds with her teeth and staring out of the window on the other side. I look over too. The wheat fields on that side seem greener. The telegraph poles lining the track skip past to a steady beat. The bespectacled man on my right has nodded off. I am sitting in a hard-seat carriage with a hundred strangers, swaying from side to side as the train clatters along. It feels nice. My nerves begin to calm. I don’t want to read, or speak, or move, or think. . Live your own life. . Sky beyond the sky. . Empty, everything is empty. .
For three days the train crosses the plains of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, then swerves down along the Yellow River and enters the Hexi Corridor of Gansu — a long strip of land bordered by the Qilian mountains to the south and the fringes of the Gobi Desert to the north. Two thousand years ago this was China’s main escape route to the West.
At dawn on the fourth day I open my eyes and see the green fields have given way to a barren waste. Rays of morning sun beat on the Qilian mountains that stretch along the gravel corridor like a huge spread-eagled beast. The fierce rays heat the train windows and make the dust on the floor sparkle like snow. Everything bathes in their light: the gold-and-red banner emblazoned with the message LOVE THE PEOPLE that hangs above the door, the folded quilts at the end of each bench, even the cardboard boxes on the luggage rack. This is the sun of the high plateau that bakes the land dry and leaves one nowhere to hide. Distant snowcaps dangling in the sky gleam enticingly. I decide to make a break in my journey and get off at the next stop.
An hour later, the train pulls up at Jiayuguan. The station is huge, because the town stands at the western limit of the Great Wall, and the Wall is China’s most prized cultural relic. Four years ago, when Deng Xiaoping first welcomed foreign tourists back to China, Jiayuguan was one of just twenty-eight towns he allowed them to visit.
So, smelling of tobacco, jasmine tea, dirty nylon socks and the vomit of my fellow passengers, I step off the train and take a deep breath of March air. After a last glance at the dusty carriage, I swing my bag onto my back and make for the exit.
A brand-new Japanese minibus is parked in the forecourt. Children and adults have gathered around it. Some study the foreign letters printed on the door, others peer through to the leather seats inside. The driver is smoking, his eyes fixed on the exit. He watches me approach.
‘Excuse me, comrade, do you know if there’s a hotel around here?’ I ask, gulping the cold air.
‘You can try the guesthouse run by the town’s revolution committee. Walk straight ahead and take the first on your left,’ he says, pointing the way with his cigarette.
A long-distance bus pulls up in front of me. Two peasants clamber onto the roof to tie a sheep to the rack. As they pin it down, it kicks its legs in the air and stares into the sky. A boy with a runny nose sees me pass and yells, ‘Big American! Big American!’
I walk to the centre of town along a wide empty street. Apart from the occasional concrete building, most of the houses are of pale adobe and crammed into a confusion of heights. Sunlight bounces off a propaganda picture on a whitewashed wall. It is a painting of a little girl in a red skirt standing between a man and a woman. The slogan beneath says CARRY OUT FAMILY PLANNING. CONTRIBUTE TO THE FOUR MODERNISATIONS. The sky in the picture is as blue as the sky above the roofs.