I debated about whether I should enter this room, which was certainly off-limits to the party. I was hungry, however, and even cold, my rice smelled delicious, rich with pork and scallions. I was slightly worried about Meiling, but I assumed she must’ve gone home, after finding me asleep. I thought of joking with my cousin tomorrow, about how both our girlfriends had left in disgust.
I expected Lulu’s grandmother’s bedroom to be dark, but when I turned the handle, I saw that I was mistaken. There was a bedside lamp, on one of those fancy dimmer switches, turned to the lowest setting. The couple on the bed were so wrapped up in each other—quite literally—that they didn’t stop what they were doing right away. She was on top, her hands pressing down on his shoulders and her head thrown back. His eyes were shut, and he was holding her hips. They were moving very slowly. Her T-shirt was pulled up around her neck, exposing her familiar breasts: the dark nipples were pointed and hard, like a picture in a magazine. His black cotton trousers were tangled with her fashionable new jeans on the floor. I wondered if my cousin had unzipped those jeans or if she had done it for him, as she had the first time for me. I suspected that my cousin would not have needed to be guided.
When Meiling finally saw me, she pulled her shirt down—as if she were shy. My cousin’s eyes were closed, and he was perhaps too stoned to notice that anyone had come in, but I could see that Meiling was sober, as usual. She sat still on top of him, staring at me. Neither of us gasped or cried out, the way it happens in the movies, and after a moment I simply pulled the door shut behind me, being careful not to spill my plate of rice on Lulu’s grandmother’s rug. I set it down carefully on an ornamental table, and walked out the front door into the hallway, past the clay horses and the bouquet of silk flowers in its imitation porcelain vase.
Only once I was outside did I realize that I didn’t have my jacket or my wallet. But nothing could’ve made me go back into that apartment. Nor could I stand the idea of going back to my dorm room, where I imagined Meiling might come to find me in the morning. I walked around the traffic circle until I found an old man sleeping in his motor-rickshaw. He was unhappy when I gave him directions, and I thought of how much grumpier he would be when he found I had no money. I did, however, have the key to my cousin’s apartment, where there were always a few yuan hidden in a box underneath the sink.
Had the police come to X’s apartment that night, they would have found all the evidence they needed: the mess, the magazine (our manifesto), and the crumpled Chinese flag, not to mention one of the perpetrators, naked under a blanket, suffering from more than a hangover. I would’ve been the one to answer for the Polaroids lying carelessly on the table, the suspicious books, the videotape of Something That Is Not Art that was eventually produced for Belgian television.
But I was lucky, as usual. No one came that night, and when I woke up later that morning, parched again and shivering, it was to the loudspeaker of a man selling nuts and dried jujubes from a cart outside the window.
61.
AT THE MOMENT POLICE FROM THE CHAOYANG BRANCH ARRIVED IN THE East Village to interrupt Baoyu’s Lunch—a performance so famous I will not describe it here, except to say that (by coincidence with our own story) it involved several dead fish—I was sitting in the library at Beijing Normal. I hadn’t spoken to Meiling, although she’d left me notes and even waited one day outside my dorm, practically begging me for a chance to talk. I brushed her off: what was the point? Spitefully, I refused to go to the village for Baoyu’s performance, where Meiling and my cousin would certainly be among the spectators, but I couldn’t help imagining everyone gathering in the courtyard: the festive atmosphere in which I would’ve been included, if not for the treachery of my two best friends. I wondered if anyone had ever suffered so unjustly.
I was supposed to be participating in a review session in the library. Instead of listening to my classmates expounding on Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, however, I was daydreaming about Meiling and my cousin, imagining them in various romantic scenarios: climbing the Great Wall, visiting the Da Jue Si, paddleboating on Houhai Lake. I envisioned the storm that might come up at just the wrong moment, tipping their fragile craft and revealing the tragic fact that neither could swim. While my classmates compared theses, I imagined the headline in the student newspaper: “Undergrad’s Untimely End in Tryst with Untrustworthy Artist.”
The above illustrates my state of mind a month after the incident at my birthday party. On Sunday, June 12, 1994, my review session lasted from eleven to one. Sometime in the last half hour, four armed policemen arrived in the East Village and arrested everyone in Cash’s courtyard. By six o’clock that evening—when I was heading to the dining hall with my roommate, Little Gao—most of the bystanders had been released with warnings. Only three people remained in detention: Baoyu, my cousin, and Meiling.
I learned the details from Fang, who came to see me two days later. He had spent the whole day waiting outside the detention center in Changping, trying to get in to see our friends, and in the end had only been able to send some cigarettes through the guards. Fang told me how on Sunday he had attended Baoyu’s Lunch, but had left early to grab something to eat himself, along with Cash, Yuchen, and Tianming. As it turned out, that lunch was the thing that saved them. Ten minutes after they’d left, the police had arrived in the courtyard.
As soon as he got home from the detention center, Fang had telephoned Harry Lin at his apartment on the Qinghua campus. Harry said that the police had searched all of the artists’ rooms in the East Village, where they’d found photographs, our first issue of Lu Kou (as well as plans for the second), and several videotapes. They had also found our country’s flag: dirty, crumpled, and stashed in the corner of X’s bedroom. According to Harry, the police had shown the videotapes to some university professors, and asked whether they were art. Those professors, whoever they were, had said no.
Harry had told Fang that the rest of us might receive visits from the police in the next few days. He advised us to lie low, and avoid meeting each other in public. Most important, we should not go back to the East Village.
It was summer, and the detention center would be hot. I thought that there would be vermin there, maybe even rats, and remembered how Meiling used to complain about the conditions in our dormitories, especially the smell of the toilets. I thought of the people she would be imprisoned with; I was afraid she wasn’t important enough to be put in solitary. I was surprised she hadn’t been released the evening of the twelfth, along with the others not directly involved. I knew Meiling’s habit of saying what she thought, and I wondered if she’d somehow insulted the police. Either that, or she had bravely refused to leave my cousin.
Meiling and X were in real trouble. My revenge fantasies stopped, but instead of thinking logically about what I might do to help them, I continued to dream up unrealistic scenarios. Now I imagined myself as their savior, calling on my father’s connections to rescue them. I would wait outside the building for the two of them to stumble into daylight, and nod solemnly as X took my hands, begging: “Can you ever forgive me, cousin?” Meiling would throw her arms around my neck, and whisper, “I made a terrible mistake.”
It’s true that women do not tend to rush into the arms of people whose fathers have made important telephone calls. Ordinarily they reserve that type of behavior for genuine heroes, such as people who’ve been persecuted for their beliefs. I’m glad to say that I did try calling my father, who was worried but helpless. (He was especially concerned about the flag the police had found.) Perhaps in Shanghai he would’ve been able to do something, he told me, but in the capital he had no power. Even though I’d been circumspect about my involvement in my cousin’s activities, I still got a lecture about staying away from X once he was released.
In spite of Harry’s warning, Fang and I met a week later, in the dumpling shop behind the university. Fang hadn’t returned to the East Village himself, but he’d talked to Tianming. The photographer could
n’t help going back to his old neighborhood, where he’d found his room sealed off with tape. Tianming’s landlord told him that the same thing had happened to X, Baoyu, and Cash’s rooms. The police had fined the landlords each 1,000 RMB, and warned them not to rent rooms to artists anymore.
“He knows it’s risky, but he keeps going,” Fang said. “He even took some pictures.” Fang reached into his backpack and removed one of Tianming’s snapshots, holding it reverently between his palms, so as not to touch the print.
The picture showed my cousin’s place, from across the street. Perhaps Tianming hadn’t dared to get closer. The photograph was characteristically black-and-white, although there was no white in the picture: the sky was dark, and the only pale spots were the pieces of litter blowing in the road. You could see the remains of posters for Baoyu’s Lunch, torn away from my cousin’s door; for some reason the hand-lettered sign X had left that afternoon for the photographers was undisturbed. He must’ve written it just before leaving for Cash’s courtyard, taking care to translate for any foreigners who might be attending the show. In Chinese, the sign read “Back Soon,” but in English X had striven for something more elegant: “Closed until further noticed.” I couldn’t help ascribing meaning to my cousin’s grammatical error.
“Where’s Tianming now?” I asked.
“Hiding,” Fang said. “No one knows where.”
Something in Fang’s tone told me he was lying. I couldn’t understand why he would keep Tianming’s whereabouts a secret from me, unless it was simple jealousy. I knew Fang idolized the older photographer, and guarded their particular friendship, but the extraordinary circumstances in which we found ourselves should have canceled out such petty emotions.
“The question is, who tipped off the police?” Fang continued, uncharacteristically ignoring the plate of steaming jiaozi in front of him. “How did they know to come to that courtyard, on that Wednesday, precisely at that time?”
“There were those fliers,” I said. I still had several of the fliers in my dorm room, which someone had dropped off a few days before the performance, and I knew they would’ve been pasted around the village as well. Posting directions to our performances had been my idea, after I’d had trouble finding Something That Is Not Art. I told Fang about the two men I had seen after that performance, smoking cigarettes outside of X’s apartment.
“They could’ve seen Drip-Drop a couple months ago, and then gone to the police with one of the fliers for Baoyu’s Lunch.”
But Fang was not convinced. “We’ve had fliers before,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened.”
Several days later, Fang telephoned from a public call shop. Two cops had come to question him in Tongxian, where he’d been staying with his aunt since the arrests.
“You’re next,” he said. “Be careful. Don’t give them any more information than you need to, and make sure there’s nothing in your room. If they didn’t take me, you’ll be OK.”
I got rid of my fliers for Baoyu’s Lunch, as well as the old ones I had saved from Drip-Drop and Something That Is Not Art. I couldn’t bear to give up the first issue of Lu Kou, and I knew the police had copies of our magazine anyway. Since my name was on it, they would be able to use it against me if they felt like it. I waited another week in a state of jumpy anxiety, and Fang called two more times. Each time I told him no one had come.
“I didn’t live there, after all,” I said. “Maybe they don’t think I’m important enough to question.”
“Uh-huh,” Fang said. Then, calmly, as if he didn’t know how important this would be to me, he said: “I talked to Professor Lin again. Your cousin and Baoyu are still being held, but they’ve released Meiling.”
My heart was so loud, I was afraid Fang would hear it over the phone line. It was like the feeling I had every morning waking up, before I remembered what had happened. For a moment it was as if the old Meiling was out there somewhere, and all I had to do was find her.
“Where is she?”
“Home with her parents in Chongqing,” Fang said. “Her dad came to get her.”
At least I knew she was safe. My first thought was of writing her a letter, telling her I never wanted to see her again. My second was of getting on a train to Chongqing.
“Who knows if she’ll ever be able to come back to school,” Fang said. “This could ruin her life.”
In my self-absorbed state, I thought Fang was trying to console me.
“I may be angry at her,” I told him. “But I hope she gets to come back to school. I’m glad she’s not in jail anymore—I was really worried about her.”
“Uh-huh,” Fang said.
I knew Fang was still working part-time in the office at CAFA, where Meiling and I had first met him. Two weeks later I called him there, to see whether he’d heard anything more, but a young woman answered the phone and told me he was out sick. I tried several more times over the next two weeks, but Fang was always out of the office when I called. I left him messages, but I never heard anything back.
Why would they have come for me when they already had my cousin? I had never rented a room in the East Village, nor had I been anything more than a bit player in someone else’s performance. Fang should’ve known me well enough to realize that no matter how upset I was, I wasn’t the kind of person to go to the Chaoyang police station and file a complaint. Even if it had occurred to me to do such a thing, I would have hesitated, considered, and turned them in a thousand times in my head, until it became too late.
In the weeks after the arrests I dreamed again and again of the East Village. I dreamed of the police, and of horrible prisons—like a Piranesi etching—levels and levels of bricked-up rooms, from which I heard screaming and the clanging of equipment. In my dreams I descended circular stone stairwells, ignoring the cries for help, until I found her—stretched out on a couch in a cold village room. I woke up with my hand in my sweatpants, and once, with tears on my face.
Bie xiao wo: don’t laugh at me. I was nineteen years old, you’re thinking: what did I know about love? And maybe you’re right. But I have never been sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love. Perhaps real love is too boring to talk about. Heartbreak is so much easier to understand that I think we might sometimes employ it as an understudy, a stand-in for the real thing.
62.
CECE DID NOT BELIEVE IN GOD PER SE, BUT SHE HAD FAITH IN SOME large system of accounts. If you did something good for someone, interest would come back to you; if you did something bad, your balance decreased. She had even been thinking, just a few moments before the doorbell rang, that it would be nice to have one more person. The table was designed for eight settings; with seven she had to fudge things, and still it looked awkward, as if they were hiding something.
It was two-thirty, and she was waiting for the rolls to come out, so that she could put in the apple pie. She’d done the pumpkin early this morning; it was cooling on a rack on the breakfast-room table. In fact she should’ve reversed the order and done the rolls last, so that they would come warm from the oven, but the rising always made her nervous (what if you got bad yeast?), and she liked to start anything that required baking early. She could always warm them up in the oven before everyone sat down.
When the doorbell rang, Cece ignored it. There were four other people in the house, not counting Mr. Yuan (who was upstairs typing on Max’s old computer). Joan was supposed to arrive at four for cocktails, and Cece hoped to sit down at five exactly. No one was helping her in the kitchen; there had been some halfhearted offers from the children this morning, but truthfully Cece preferred to do it alone. She had allowed Gordon to peel the sweet potatoes, and then sent him off with the children until it was time to carve. Max was probably in his room, listening to his headphones. She had encouraged him to invite Jasmine today, and then was relieved when he said that her family wanted her at home.
The doorbell rang again. Had Olivia gone for a run?
“Gordo
n?” she called. When she looked out at the pool, she saw someone swimming laps. That would be Phil, of course.
Cece sighed and wiped her hands on her old Williams-Sonoma apron. She used a paper towel to blot her face and moved the unbaked pie toward the center of the island, just in case Salty knocked against it. As she hurried through the dining room, she took plea sure in the spicy pumpkin smell, the ticking of her grandfather’s grandfather clock, and the centerpiece of decorative Indian corn. Maybe Olivia had forgotten her keys, Cece thought, glancing through the bubbled glass peephole (you could never see anything), yanking the heavy door the way you had to, and stepping back as it swung wide open.
The woman on the doorstep was thin, with dark hair, heavy-lidded black eyes, and a slightly aquiline nose. She might have been of Middle Eastern descent, or even something more exotic; she was wearing an expensive red cashmere sweater with three-quarter sleeves, hip-hugger jeans slightly flared at the bottom (the way Olivia liked them), and a pair of high-heeled leather boots. She was holding a large white shopping bag, and looking at Cece with a panicked expression, as if she were thinking of scurrying off into the undergrowth like the bush baby, and never being seen again.
“Can I help you?” Cece asked.
“I think so,” the woman said, and at that moment Cece knew. Of course she knew. She was surprised she hadn’t recognized her immediately.
“I’m Aubrey? Phil’s friend? I’m sorry to disturb you—it was sort of a last-minute thing.”
“Aubrey! How wonderful. We’ve been waiting to meet you for so long. And I was just thinking we needed an eighth to night, or we were going to have way too much…” But Cece couldn’t continue. Her whole upper body was hot and prickly, and for a second she worried she was having an allergic reaction: her breath was coming shallowly, as if her throat had suddenly swollen.
The Dissident Page 34
