Beijing Comrades

by Scott E. Myers

  “Hey,” I said, dispensing with my silliness once and for all. “Just don’t get sucked in too deep, okay? Something bad could happen. I mean, really, look at the Cultural Revolution. What good came of that?”

  “I know,” he said, pulling his gaze from the window and looking at me again. “I won’t, I promise. I’m not even participating in the hunger strike. I’m just a sympathizer.” He lifted my hand and pressed it against his cheek.

  And so it was that all across Beijing students were “making revolution.” According to Lan Yu, however, some students were less interested in making revolution than in taking advantage of other people’s revolution so they could skip class and do their own thing. He told me there were three distinct “parties” on campus that benefited from the student walkout.

  The first were the “Trotskyites.” They weren’t really Trotskyites. They were just called that because, in Chinese, “Trotsky Party” sounded like “TOEFL Party.” Those were the TOEFL maniacs, the students who spent all their free time studying for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, usually to get into a good study-abroad or graduate program. Relieved of their class duties, members of the Trotsky Party were free to spend the duration of the student walkout studying for their impending English exams.

  The second group of opportunists was the “Mahjong Party”—the students who, if given the chance, would be happy to do nothing but play mahjong all day. So when the revolution came, that was what they did.

  And finally there was the “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck Party.” Those were the couples, the students in love, who were not likely to complain about having additional time to gaze into each other’s eyes.

  I tried to make Lan Yu confess he was part of the Butterfly and Mandarin Duck Party, but he insisted he wasn’t. That party, he told me, was strictly for “serious” couples. I didn’t say anything, but it wasn’t lost on me that he obviously felt that what we had was nothing more than an illicit affair, a secret pleasure stolen in the night.

  The truth was that what we called ourselves—what we called this thing we had—didn’t matter anymore. The only thing that mattered was that we were together nearly every day at this point. Classes at universities across Beijing were effectively suspended, and Lan Yu had a great deal of free time on his hands. When we weren’t in bed, most of our time was spent dining in restaurants. I was cautious about this latter activity, though, frequently changing locations so we wouldn’t be seen together often.

  I knew a few gay spots, but never took him to any. There were no real gay bars in Beijing in those days, just private parties and a few hotels whose bars were known to be gay meeting points. None of the bars openly called themselves gay, nor could they, but it was common knowledge that many of the patrons were. In some cases management knew this, but turned a blind eye as long as things stayed discreet. It didn’t matter anyway, because taking Lan Yu to these places was out of the question. To me he was like a perfect piece of jade: flawless, absolutely unblemished. Taking him out to enjoy Beijing’s incipient gay nightlife would have been tantamount to inviting other guys to go after him.

  Although I never took Lan Yu to gay places, I took him to plenty of straight ones. One night we went to a karaoke bar where the working girls provided the “three accompaniments.” The first accompaniment referred to chatting, the second to singing, and the third to drinking or fucking, depending on the girl’s character and which bar you happened to be at. I deliberately chose a young and very innocent looking girl to accompany Lan Yu, and she spent the evening chatting, singing, and drinking with him. She was a nice girl and I thought we were having a great time, but Lan Yu looked uncomfortable the whole night. When we stepped out of the bar and into the street, I smiled and poked him in the ribcage.

  “What’s the matter? Did she scare you?”

  “No, I just wasn’t into her.”

  “You need to practice being with girls!” I said with a laugh, placing emphasis on the word girls as if this would somehow make him see the patent obviousness of what I was saying. “Otherwise, how are you going to find a wife?”

  Lan Yu shoved his hands in his pockets and pinned his gaze to the sidewalk before us. I knew him well enough to know what silence meant. He was upset.

  “Look,” I continued, “you’re young now, but pretty soon you’re going to have to start thinking about these things.”

  This only aggravated him further. Abruptly, he halted on the sidewalk and gripped my shoulder to make me slow down. “Why do we have to get married?” he asked in a fraught voice. “Aren’t things fine the way they are now? What’s wrong with what we have?”

  I gave him a conciliatory smile but didn’t say anything in response. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer to his question. I did. I knew exactly what was wrong with what we had. But I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to fight about it, especially not in public.

  Lan Yu continued brooding about it as we walked toward the car. Ahead of us a young Uyghur was selling lamb kebabs at a grill parked on the sidewalk. The rich smell of mutton and spice after so much beer was too great a temptation to pass up, so we stopped and bought thirty wooden sticks. The Uyghur’s Mandarin wasn’t great, but he was friendly and chatted with us as we stood eating under the stars. Lan Yu didn’t feel like small talk, though. The instant we left he asked me in a deep whisper, as if afraid the street vendor might overhear, “Do you want to get married?”

  “Of course I do!” I laughed. “Maybe I’ll go out and find me a nice little lady this weekend!” He was visibly hurt by my flippant comment, which I’d made for no reason but to avoid the subject. But I just didn’t feel like getting into it with him. It was my fault for having brought up marriage to begin with.

  It was past midnight when we got to the car, which I’d parked in an open lot on the roof of a building. It was dark and quiet, and our footsteps knocked loudly on the concrete rooftop, which was empty except for a handful of lonely cars waiting patiently for their owners. Aside from the moonlight, the only visible light was a flickering glow emanating from the window of a tiny Public Security booth perched near the top of the staircase. Inside, a guard sat fast asleep in front of a small black-and-white TV. A comedic performance was playing, and soft peals of audience laughter erupted periodically and floated into the night sky. Apart from the three of us, there wasn’t a soul around.

  I couldn’t see Lan Yu’s face clearly in the dark, but I could sense that there was something wrong. He stopped abruptly and turned to face me.

  “Handong,” he said after taking a deep breath. “I’m not getting married. There’s no turning back for me.”

  He stood close to me, so close that I could smell the familiar scent of his breath when he spoke. I felt the tension rise in my chest as I fought the urge to throw myself into his arms. I never would have thought I could have done this in public, but in one rapid motion I grabbed him and held him tight. The words raced through my mind—There’s no turning back for me either!—though I couldn’t bring myself to say them. I knew in my heart Lan Yu was becoming my world.

  I pulled him closer and pressed my lips against his, and I suddenly realized that this was the first time we had ever kissed in public. I remember thinking we should have been on a tropical beach, on the highest mountaintop, or in a beautiful clearing of trees. We should have been surrounded by a halo of sunshine. But there was only darkness.

  On the morning of June 3 I had barely stepped into my office and had my first sip of tea when I received a call from Cai Ming, a professor friend who informed me in intonations befitting a radio crime drama that tonight was the night the students were going to act. I asked him how he knew for sure.

  “Believe me,” he said. “It’s 99 percent accurate.”

  The announcement didn’t come as a surprise. Given the way tensions had been brewing the past couple of days, I was actually shocked the students hadn’t acted sooner.

  A few hours later, my mother called to tell me that under no
circumstances was I to go outside that night. She was distressed about activities taking place in the streets, so I tried playing it down by assuring her that nothing was going to happen.

  “Besides,” I said, “what would I go out for? I’m not interested in stirring up any trouble.”

  I hung up the phone and immediately called Ephemeros. When Lan Yu picked up the phone I told him he was not to even think about going outside. We argued about it for a while before he finally agreed. But two hours later, at around 5:30 p.m., he called to say something big was happening. He and a classmate were heading to Tian’anmen Square.

  I lost my temper when I heard this. “You are not going out tonight!” I shouted, stretching the phone cord so I could close my office door for privacy.

  “We’re just going to check it out! I’ll be home later tonight.”

  “No! I’m telling you, Lan Yu, something bad is going to happen!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Believe me. It’s 100 percent accurate,” I said, deliberately inflating Cai Ming’s initial assessment.

  “Well, I’m going.”

  “What’s gotten into you, Lan Yu?” I was angry. But I was also worried.

  “I’ll be back before ten, Handong! I’ll be careful, I promise.” He had clearly made up his mind. Why was he suddenly being so goddamn stubborn? I hung up the phone and rushed out of the office, telling my secretary to cancel my six o’clock.

  There were very few people outside and most of the shops had closed earlier than usual. An eerie silence hung in the air as I soared past one of the many clusters of apartment buildings that had popped up in recent years. An old man in a beige cardigan stood on a balcony. With a cigarette in his mouth and a wire clothesline above him, he tended to a potted flower while a girl stood at his side watching attentively. It was a vision of normalcy in a city on the verge of chaos.

  I was home in fifteen minutes, but it was too late. Lan Yu was gone. This, I thought angrily, is the so-called “benefit” of being with a guy. They just do whatever they want!

  With Lan Yu nowhere in sight, I had no choice but to return to the streets and look for him there. I drove aimlessly at first, passing large groups of people one moment and empty streets the next, hoping that by the grace of some miracle I would see him. The mood outside was tense. After what felt like an eternity, I finally parked the car and sat down, exhausted, near the main gate of Tianda University, which was kilometers from Tian’anmen but not one bit lacking in demonstrators. Rubbing my temples, I told myself that I had been stupid to imagine I would just magically stumble across Lan Yu in a city of this size. I glanced at my watch. A quarter past eleven. I’d been driving for five hours.

  The atmosphere around Tianda was carnivalesque. Large groups of students walked together, some waving flags, others playing guitars and singing folk songs. A portable cassette player blared out “The Internationale” and the Chinese national anthem. I heard the shrill but commanding voice of a female student screaming into a bullhorn: “Support Tian’anmen! Support Tian’anmen!”

  The nighttime June air was humid and oppressive. The city seemed darker than usual and there wasn’t a star in the sky. Again and again, I used a pay phone to call home, cursing myself for having forgotten my cell and Lan Yu for refusing to have one. But Lan Yu wasn’t there.

  Exhausted and despondent, I eventually felt I had no choice but to go home and wait. It was before dawn and I was tired, but I only went into the house for a brief moment to see if Lan Yu was there. When he wasn’t, I went back outside and squatted at the side of the road. I wanted to wait along the main artery leading to Ephemeros Village because I knew Lan Yu would have to use it to get home. There I sat, chain-smoking and going over all the various possibilities of what might have happened. I hadn’t eaten in nearly eighteen hours, since lunchtime the previous day, but wasn’t at all hungry. A soft red glow rose in the east, and I started to lose hope, wondering if something bad had happened. Lan Yu! I thought to myself. Lan Yu, Lan Yu, Lan Yu! I held my head in my hands and looked down at the ground, repeating his name over and over.

  Finally, I pulled myself together and started thinking about what to do next. I decided that I had to go back out and look for him again. Even if I myself had to go to Tian’anmen, even if I got killed, I had to go back out. I stood up to get into the car.

  Just as I was standing, I saw a figure in the distance moving toward me. I didn’t even have to see his face to know that the person limping in my direction was him. When he got closer I saw that his white shirt was covered in bloodstains. Even his face was smeared with streaks of blood. I was stunned into silence.

  “Those people are fascists! Animals!” he seethed as he approached me.

  “My god!” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Lan Yu, what happened?”

  He looked down at the blood splattered across his chest. “It’s not mine,” he said. “Other people’s blood got all over me.” I knew I was supposed to be consoled by these words, but seeing him drenched in the blood of others was just as horrifying as if it had been his own.

  He told me he had hiked all the way from Beiheyan Street. When we entered the house, I wanted to get him out of his clothes and into a hot bath immediately, but he refused, saying he just wanted to sit down for a minute. I made him some tea, then we sat at the kitchen table and he told me what had happened.

  “The first time they started shooting at us, everybody ran in the opposite direction and I fell to the ground and started crawling. When they finally stopped, I looked up ahead and saw someone just lying there—not moving at all. I reached out to grab him because I wanted him to keep moving, but when I took hold of his hand it was covered in blood! Everywhere around us people were yelling and throwing things at military vehicles. There was this girl on the ground next to me—I tried grabbing her shoulder to make her come with me, but she just kept lying there—I mean, she couldn’t even move, she was so scared! Then they started shooting at us again, but she still wouldn’t move so I crawled on top of her and covered her head with my arm. I crushed her hand by accident and she started crying, but . . .,” he stammered and looked up at me in despair. “What else could I do?”

  I shuddered as I listened. My mind filled with gruesome and bloody images of what had happened.

  Lan Yu grew quiet for a while as he sat at the kitchen table and carefully examined his forearms and elbows, which were dotted with tiny cuts and the occasional big red scuff mark. It was hard for me to imagine him—so meek and full of tenderness—braving a hailstorm of bullets to save the lives of others.

  “There were more and more injured people lying on the ground,” he continued. “We just started dragging everyone toward any pedicab we could find and putting them in. We carried this one guy who was completely covered in blood . . . We carried him for so long, Handong! We wanted to find someone with a flatbed tricycle, the kind used for transporting goods, so we could put him on it. We finally found one, but the old man riding it said the guy we were carrying wasn’t even breathing. That’s when I realized the whole time we’d been carrying a dead man . . .”

  On and on he went. Lan Yu had never been a very verbal person, and this was the first time I’d ever heard him talk this much. Finally, his stuttering voice faded off and he became quiet.

  “You must have been scared to death,” I said, stroking his hair. We had moved to the couch, where Lan Yu rested his head in my lap.

  “Sort of, not really,” he said, looking up at me and clutching the cloth of my trousers at the knee. “Everything was happening so fast you didn’t even know you were supposed to be scared. But now—yeah, I realize I was scared, especially when I saw how the streets were full of tanks and military vehicles. Some of the people were able to hide in the narrower lanes. There were also a few people who tried to pull me into their houses, but I just wanted to get home as soon as possible.”

  He looked up at me again. I kissed his forehead, then stood up to draw a hot bath and help him take
off his clothes. The most important thing, I knew, was to get him warm and in bed. After that I was going to wash his shirt. It was his favorite, the white one he loved so much, and I didn’t want it getting ruined.

  After his bath, we got into bed, exhausted from the long night’s events but too agitated to sleep.

  “I really thought I was going to die,” he said as I held him in my arms. “I thought I was never going to see you again.” I kissed his forehead. He felt so good, so warm and clean and perfect after the nightmare of what had happened.

  My eyes suddenly brightened into a playful smile. “I can’t believe how selfish you are!” I exclaimed. “I was about to go to Tian’anmen Square to look for you. I might have gotten killed. Did you ever think about that?”

  “You were really going to go there?” he asked in wonder. “You mean, you really—you really care for me that much?” The word care came out very quietly, as if he was somehow afraid to say it.

  Afraid of showing my true feelings, I squeezed him tight and adopted a blithe tone. “No,” I said, “I hate you! In fact, now that you’re not dead, I’m gonna kill you!”

  With the fear of death behind us, our bodies came together, each man taking the other’s flesh as proof that he was alive. I loved Lan Yu’s body. I loved holding him, feeling him next to me, his warmth. He was so full of life. I pressed my lips against his neck and held my cheek against his chest and listened to his heartbeat. He was mine! He was here!

  Lan Yu fell into my arms, alternating between kissing the curve of my neck and looking up at me. His beautiful dark eyes were full of something—what was it? Fervor, a fervor that was as passionate as it was intoxicating. His lips touched mine and my head swirled with one thought: I cannot, will not, lose you!

  I fell to the floor and Lan Yu cascaded with me. We collapsed into each other’s arms and the words came out. Those three nauseating words I had never said before, not even to a girl.

  “I love you!” My heart pounded in my chest. I cradled his cheeks in the palms of my hands and my eyes burned into his. I would have liked to dive headlong into his body if I could. I couldn’t believe I had said it, but at the same time it felt so natural coming out. It was the only thing I felt at that moment, the only thing I could think of to say.