Everything goes as usual. I tell the doctor I feel feverish and nauseous, he hands me a bottle, I take it to the toilets, fill it with the potion I prepared at home, then deliver it to the lab and wait.
‘You should be in hospital!’ Dr Sun cries as he walks in with the results.
‘No need. I’ve had hepatitis before. A week in bed, at home, and I’ll be fine.’
He hands me a note for a seven-day sick leave. I carry it to the work unit and press it into Director Zhang’s palm.
‘Go home and rest,’ he says. ‘In a few days’ time, Deputy Qian and I will come and see how you are doing. You still have ten days before your self-criticism is due. Now you must take care of yourself.’
‘Go to hell, Director Zhang,’ I mumble as I step onto the street. Never trust the wily fox who shows concern for the sick chicken, as the proverb goes. The crowds and buses are moving faster than usual. Hurry! One foot in front of the other. My legs move faster and faster.
Zhang Wen is the chairman of our art discussion group. He lives in Meiguang Lane. You can get off the bus at Drum Tower or Beihai Park, the distance is about the same. But I always get off at Drum Tower to avoid walking past the former residence of Guo Muoruo. When that giant of Maoist literature passed away, the Party installed a guard to protect the hallowed ground. The thick red walls that enclose his house spread such terror through the air that no one talks or smiles when they pass, even children fall silent. In fact, it is not the walls that terrify, but the soldiers and guns that lie behind. There are many such buildings in Beijing. These fine compound houses used to belong to rich merchants and aristocrats. When the communists came to power they butchered the owners and moved their cronies in.
Zhang Wen’s house is even smaller than mine. His single bed fills half the room and his paintings fill the rest. There are no chairs, so visitors perch along the bed while he stands by the door. Sometimes he weaves his tall thin body through the room, pouring out tea, eyes fixed on his guests’ every move, terrified they might touch a painting. ‘Careful!’ he says, ‘That one’s not dry yet’ or ‘Careful! That frame is loose!’
Yang Yu is in the corner at the far end of the bed. He is stout and thick-set, wears a red T-shirt, and looks nothing like his delicate, fragile paintings. By day he works at the Red Star Machinery Plant.
Ke Lu is perched in front. The light glinting on his thick glasses makes his lips seem even heavier than they are. At night he sells lamb kebabs and boiled tripe in the Dongsi Muslim Restaurant. When I go there to buy sesame seed cakes, he always gives me one fresh from the oven.
Skinny Chen Wen, a welder at Tiananmen Match Factory, is sitting on his left. He looks at objects, not people, especially not people’s eyes. Yu Lei the set designer is seated next to him, sketching me. From time to time he glances up with a look of furious concentration.
Zhao Lan steps into the room, sweeps her hair back and squeezes in next to Yu Lei. She paints large watercolours of lush, mysterious rainforests. During the Cultural Revolution, she spent five years clearing the jungles of Yunnan.
I sit on a stool by the door. Zhang Wen’s belly presses into my back as he breathes. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says, ‘Today Ma Jian is going to talk about his paintings and show us his work, then everyone can make comments.’ He leans over and passes Zhao Lan a cup of tea. His arm shakes. ‘Careful, Zhao Lan, it’s hot!’
‘What do you mean make comments?’ Yang Yu growls. ‘This isn’t a Party meeting, for God’s sake. If you want to say something, say it. If you’d rather fart, then fart!’
‘Look, we all decided we needed a chairman. I said comment — not criticise. Remember when Yu Lei discussed Toulouse-Lautrec? It was very informal, everyone said what they liked.’ Zhang Wen’s paintings are subtle and intricate. During the Cultural Revolution, when landscape painting was considered a counter-revolutionary crime, he wrapped his paint box in a brown paper bag and sneaked outside the city walls to paint fields and rivers and lakes. He painted the small picture by the light bulb during a performance conducted by Seiji Ozawa at the Beijing Concert Hall. The orchestra looks like a rock lashed by the stormy waves of the sea. Next to this picture is a portrait of his sick mother, crowned by a spray of deathly white hair.
‘I have seven paintings here,’ I begin. ‘This one is winter — a cement house behind a cement wall. Even the windows seem to be made of cement. The only sign of man’s existence is the red and yellow slogan on the wall.’
‘Careful! Put it — there. No — there!’
‘It’s leaning against my leg, don’t worry.’
‘Can’t see, lift it up a little.’
‘You’re holding it upside down.’
The painting is passed around the room, then placed face down at the far end of the bed.
‘This is a branch in the snow — a black stroke across a sheet of white. I wanted to convey the noise that lies within silence. . I painted this on the streets of Wuhan. It was a hot day, a crowd of people were standing in a doorway eating noodles. It looked like a stage set so I made the awning drape like stage curtains. . This one I painted straight onto hardboard after a dream about being eaten alive. That’s my family photograph in the middle. Some of the faces in the crowd are familiar to me, some not. The man gnawing my foot in the foreground is my neighbour. He runs a grave-clothes shop outside the Chinese Medicine Hospital, and is always telling me the dead are nicer than the living. The face on the left is mine.’
‘The tones are very interesting. . Careful! Look behind you!’ Zhang Wen jumps as Zhao Lan’s hand approaches her damp fringe and nearly knocks the tea cup perched on the wooden bedstead behind. She lowers her hand just in time, sticks out her jaw and puffs the wet strands away.
With so many people sitting inside, the room soon gets very hot. The naked bulb dangling before my eyes makes everyone’s faces look dark. Zhang Wen’s mother has been lying in bed in the shed across the yard for years. The door is always kept shut. Zhang Wen gave up his job at the post office last year to look after her. He is continually popping in to fetch her dirty bedpans and soiled cushions. When Nannan was living with me, I used to have to bring her along to the meetings. Sometimes she would fall asleep in my arms and Zhang Wen would carry her into the shed and lay her down next to his mother.
‘I like this patch of blue. In winter, the night sky always seems frozen solid like that.’
‘The style is very simple. It conveys the ordinariness of Beijing life. Too many artists ignore the life going on around them.’
‘Who needs realism? If you want realism you would do better taking a photograph. Art should express one’s subjective impressions.’
‘What is there to express in this rotten society? Your nationalism? Your love for the proletariat? What bullshit!’
Zhang Wen leans over me again and says, ‘Your paintings are very expressionist, Yang Yu. That picture of the Chinese vase you did expresses fears of annihilation, of good being brutalised by evil.’
‘Men don’t have an inner world, they’re just walking lumps of flesh. This nightmare here — I like the way Ma Jian’s used soft colours to paint a terrifying scene. I often dream of being strangled to death, or chased by wolves, and although I am afraid, I always sense a strange warmth, as if I was being held within the arms of a woman.’