by Adam Brookes
7775 pondered again the empty bunk above him, then sat up. Time now, Peanut. Sorry, but needs must. In the darkness he felt for the gray jacket hanging from the peg above him, the white stripes across the shoulders. He padded down the center of the barracks, the concrete cold against his bare feet, biding his time. The next few hours would be tricky.
He leaned over the familiar sleeping form. “Section Chief, wake up! Prisoner Number 7775 wishes to report.”
From the section chief, nothing, just the hiss of sleep. 7775 bit his lip, then shook a shoulder. “Prisoner Number 7775 wishes to report.”
One baleful eye opened, grasping for meaning at this dead hour.
“Section Chief!” 7775 stood upright now. Better make it official, he thought. “Prisoner Number 7775 wishes to report that Prisoner Number 5995 is absent.”
“What time is it?”
“Five, Section Chief.”
A yawn, a thick smell rising from the bedroll. “What do you mean he’s absent?”
“He’s not there, Section Chief.”
“Well, where’s he gone? Isn’t it Peanut?”
“Prisoner Number 7775 does not know where Prisoner Number 5995 has gone, Section Chief.”
“Why are you talking like that? Have you been to look for him?”
“No, Section Chief.”
Over the section chief’s sleep-sodden face, a shadow of realization spread slowly. He blinked and struggled out of his bedroll. Their balding, affable section chief, himself a prisoner—saboteur apparently, though no one knew of what—was oppressor and friend both. Now he was pulling on a vest and standing pot-bellied in the dark, rubbing his hand across his chin.
“So where’s he gone?”
“I don’t know where he’s gone, Section Chief,” which got a direct look.
The section chief turned and looked out of the window at the dust and the glow from the arc lights, breath steaming the glass, fingers splayed against the pane, hopeful.
“What do we do?”
7775 opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“Yes? What?”
“7775 would suggest reporting to the duty guard officer, Section Chief.”
The section chief stared at him. “But he must be somewhere.”
“It’s been… a while.”
Panic flaring now.
“A while?”
The section chief was out of the barracks at a splay-footed run, heading towards the guard house, where the thunders were dozing in front of a Hong Kong movie in which brave monks chopped down the enemies of China.
Prisoner 5995 had a pain in his chest. The last half-hour had him stopping often, bent double, breath rasping, knees shaking. But now he looked down on a little flooded gravel pit, its black water a mirror for the stars.
You’d hardly know it was there. On three sides were jagged low cliffs, the track the only way in or out. He picked his way down to the water’s edge. To the east the sky was just starting to lighten.
The water wasn’t just cold. It was sickening. He was in up to his waist, his clothes in a bundle on his shoulder, the bottles around his neck. The cold crept up his spine, making him gag. Up to his chest now. The rock walls enclosing the water had gone from steep to sheer, and, there, a sapling clung on. Just there. Reaching up, he felt the lip of the blasting tunnel, eighteen inches above his head. His clothes went in first, then the water bottles. Bare feet scratching for purchase on the submerged rock face, fingertips clawing for grip, shoulders screaming, one elbow in and a desperate, horrible scrabble, and he was up, dripping and shaking.
The tunnel was narrower than he remembered, but deep. He’d noticed it years before, on a work party, and he’d stored away the details, as he was prone to doing. He dried off with his shirt, crouching, put the damp clothes back on, zipped up the blue tracksuit top, and shook some more. If he moved crabwise, backwards, he could disappear twenty feet into the rock.
This is where he would sit it out, the sirens and the dogs and the whatever, all the thunders buzzing around like flies in a shithouse, terrified of losing their bonuses. They must be looking by now, surely.
Heaven, he was hungry. The paper bag of crumbling cornmeal bread and greens looked tiny and woeful. What had he been thinking? Save it. Cigarette instead, then sleep.
Or maybe not. Maybe he should keep moving.
They’ll be looking, he thought. He rubbed himself, blew on his hands.
Nobody escaped. Escapees died in the desert, miles from anywhere, their tongues engorged, their flesh like putty.
But then someone had built a railway.
The sky was lightening. The water was streaked red.
Thunders were stumbling out of the guard block, doing up their belts, working the slides on their AKs, shielding their eyes against the cool morning sun. Dust hung in the air. A jeep whined out of the front gate, the driver gesticulating, then stopped, then started again and headed out on to the plain.
7775 and the others were in ranks in front of the barracks. They’d been that way for forty minutes now. The section chief, wide-eyed and sweating, stood in front of them. Three times already 7775 had told the story they’d settled on.
“I woke and he was gone,” he’d said. “It was five o’clock and I reported immediately.” Blurt it. Look contrite.
The commandant was murmuring into a mobile phone, affecting calm. The thunders looked confused and pissed off, a dangerous combination for Peanut when they found him. Which they would, 7775 was sure.
The sun was up.
He’d scraped his fingers raw clearing the tunnel floor of shale. He sat on a circle of exposed rock, dank and cold, his pathetic stores in a pile beside him.
Think of the cave as a cell, a scholar’s cell, a writer’s studio, he told himself, somewhere for reflection, for rediscovering intellectual purpose.
In the prison camp they called intellectuals “shit-eaters.” The two terms, intellectual and shit-eater, sounded almost identical, zhishifenzi/chishifenzi, their confusion irresistible. The other inmates had pegged Peanut as a shit-eater the minute he stumbled through the front gate. His soft hands gave him away.
But when the inmates found out that Peanut’s offence was not political, but was attempted murder, they backed off a little. The question of whom Peanut had attempted to murder, and why, preoccupied them. Over time it became known that Peanut’s offence had been committed on the hot night of 3 June 1989, as gunfire rang through Beijing and the foundations of China’s state shook. Peanut had, it was learned, in a moment of terror and fury, brought a lump of paving slab down upon the face of a little soldier who lay screaming at his feet. The little soldier had blinked and convulsed, and Peanut had seen the blood spatter on the asphalt. The inmates puzzled over this. How could a shit-eater, a professor, do such a thing?
So Peanut had lived the life of a hybrid: part criminal of unfathomable violence, part shit-eater. He had employed his bulk and his vengeful temperament to his advantage in dealing with the other inmates. And once he had carved out a tolerable space in the camp hierarchy, he turned his attention, over the years, to shoring up the identity bequeathed him by his parents and his classmates: one who created with the mind, who exercised an acute moral understanding of justice and power, an intellectual of China. He was, he told himself, much more than inmate; he was the wronged, exiled thinker of legend, a modern Qu Yuan, a dealer in truth reviled by the state, and never mind the paving slab.
He craned his neck and saw the gleaming water of the gravel pit.
Early on in his sentence he had decided that to preserve his sense of himself as intellectual/shit-eater, measures were required. A book. A prison memoir! Something desperate and devastating, to be smuggled out of the camp, published abroad, circulated illicitly at home. Something with a fancy, despairing title. Superfluous Words from the Desert Chamber, perhaps.
Over years, on thin, grainy, squared paper of the sort children use to practice their characters, Peanut observed and recorded. Every name,
every routine; every load of wilting cabbage dumped on the loading dock, every ton of coal from the withered little mine; every rotation of young thunders, bumping in by truck, the gray dust in their hair; every square meter of dry gray desert picked clear of rock; every stint in the xiaohao, the punishment cell; every facet of this desiccated hive deep in the Qinghai desert, Peanut tallied it and noted it down. He did this in the latrine, late at night, and built an extended, minutely detailed narrative of incarceration in modern China that would, he was certain, shock the world’s conscience and cement his place in history. He kept the pages in his bedroll, until the thunders found them.
The prison commandant was flummoxed, flimsy papers in his hands, some strewn across the floor of the barracks. Prisoner 5995, real name Li Huasheng, known as Peanut, stood, a thunder on each arm, his head forced downward, calculating.
“Prisoner 5995,” said the commandant. “You do realize these are state secrets?”
Prisoner 5995, known as Peanut, stared at the floor, hard. The commandant handed the pages to a cadaverous deputy and licked his lips. He walked absently over to the prisoner and, one finger under the chin, forced Peanut’s head up.
“Why are you gathering state secrets?”
Peanut said nothing.
“Are you spying on us?”
Peanut felt the world rock, kept his footing, just.
“Are you a spy?”
Well, strictly speaking, Commandant, the answer to that is complicated.
“I didn’t understand these were state secrets, Commandant.” The words were thick in his dry mouth. “I will confess all my mistakes.”
So he did.
First to a spiky little Labour Reform Bureau “investigator,” who made notes. They sat in an echoing concrete “investigation” room next to the camp office. Peanut talked, searched for an angle, talked more. And when he stopped talking, a bored, overweight thunder standing behind him jammed an electric baton to his neck and sparked him up.
Then a drive to the main prison complex, forty miles shackled in a van with no windows. Peanut vomited on his trousers.
Followed by a surprise visit to his old friend, the xiaohao punishment cell. This one was nothing more than an iron cage on the floor in an empty brick barracks with broken windows. The cage was not quite tall enough to sit up in. He marveled at his response, just as in the weeks after his arrest: a faint gratitude that they were, at least, leaving him alone for a few days. The thirst was very bad.
More confession, this time in a smart conference room with blond wood fittings and a window that looked out on parched poplars.
“I like to make lists, keep diaries, write. Sir.” He noticed a camera mounted on the wall, a bead of red light.
“Why would you keep lists?” This from a senior uniform, barking, the anger contrived.
Build walls, and hold them as long as you can. That was what they’d once told him. Did it apply now, here?
“It is just a way of keeping busy. Sir. Just lists, writing, observing. I confess my mistakes.”
“You were gathering state secrets.”
He stayed silent.
“If you confess you can expect leniency. If you do not confess your punishment will be severe.”
Words for the generations of China. Words for my father. Words for me.
“Yes. I confess my mistakes and my crimes,” he repeated.
A nod from the uniform, and Peanut was taken back to the xiaohao, where a plate of vegetable soup, still warm, awaited him.
The final act had come a week later. He was led, shackled, across a courtyard. A leathery old woman in a blue tunic splashed water on the concrete to keep the dust down. It was morning, late in the summer. In the air, behind the heat, a whisper of cold to come.
A jaundiced, balding judge asked cursory questions into a microphone, which stood on a table covered with green baize. A prosecutor mumbled.
He stood in the dock. To his left was a woman he had not seen before, with gray hair in a bun, who looked at her notes and said nothing. His defense lawyer, he realized. He leaned over and tried to speak to her. She pursed her lips and shook her head, a tight, definitive movement. Stay away from me. There was business about Article 32 of the State Secrets Law, and Article 111 of the Criminal Law, and they added five years to his sentence.
Back in the barracks, they’d showed him something approaching sympathy. 7775 had taken him out for a cigarette and laid a hand on his shoulder. Peanut had to stop himself laughing.
And then he’d walked off by himself, by the wall, as the dark came down. No shadowy celebrity for him, then. He watched a bat dip and flicker against the sky.
So fuck it. Once a spy, always a spy.
Day two, and panic. He had awoken at dawn, parched, to the sound of engines grinding up the track towards the gravel pit. He lay on his stomach, inched forward and peered from the mouth of the tunnel. Two jeeps, six thunders getting out of them, AKs slung. They spread out. One walked to the water’s edge and kneeled, peering at the ground and looking across the water. Another walked down to join him and seemed to be asking what he was thinking because the first thunder gestured across the water and pointed at the ground. Peanut flattened himself against the rocky tunnel floor. The second thunder appeared to be considering, then walked back towards the jeep and waved the others into the vehicles. The jeeps started up, ground into gear, and turned back down the track. The manner of their departure suggested they were not finished here.
And later in the day they were back, with a dog that bounded from the back of the jeep, a big black and brown thing with pointed ears. Its handler was in military uniform, which Peanut construed as bad news, because military uniforms suggested competence. The handler ran with the dog along the edge of the water as if in play, the dog jumping and pawing at him. And then the handler got the dog’s nose to the ground, and it began to scent. It moved this way and that, excited, turning, and whining, and looking back to its handler. Peanut slowly pushed backwards in the dark, as far as he could go. He heard the whining of the dog, some faint shouts—orders?—then nothing for a while. And then engines, moving off down the track.
The light was weakening at the mouth of the tunnel. He shifted from ham to ham on the damp floor. He was very hungry. Half of his water was gone, but the gravel pit was infested with liver fluke and undrinkable. He sat up and leaned forward, tried to touch his toes. In a little while, he would allow himself a bar of the awful chocolate. There had been no activity around the pit for six hours.
He had started, gingerly, to think about reaching the railway. In another twenty-four hours he would be getting weak, so it would have to be tonight. Twelve miles over hard ground, and no guarantees, just the freight cars lumbering down from Tibet on their way to Xining.
Who would he be, if he made it to the city, and on?
Over the years China’s bureaucratic minds had imposed many identities upon Peanut. To each a name: student, class traitor, intellectual, dissenter, criminal, prisoner. To each a season, by turns exhilarating and terrifying.
But another identity lived in him, planted and nurtured by a different bureaucracy. Its season was brief and silent and long past. Its name he had never uttered out loud, even in the darkest hours of the xiaohao or under the electric baton. Yet the name remained, preserved, he knew, in a file, in a country he’d never seen.
Night heron.
He stripped awkwardly in the confined space, bundled his clothes, reached for the little paper bag and the water bottles, and shuffled up the tunnel towards the night. The water beckoned.
Move.
2
Beijing
The morning had begun—crisp, tinged with the acrid smell of Beijing’s cold days—with a frenzy of phone calls to London and, for Mangan, a testing of the correspondent’s powers of persuasion.
Mangan had been in the “bureau,” termed more accurately the front room of his Jianguomenwai flat, since six a.m. The bureau featured two chipped and musty desks, expo
sed phone wires that protruded from holes in the whitewashed walls, and a stained blue sofa. The tiled floor made the room clatter and echo.
When the London duty editor said she was not following the Jiangxi situation, Mangan expressed mild surprise, careful not to let the telephone amplify it into stark disbelief. She’d said wryly, educate me, Philip.
Well, they’re cultists, he explained, and they’ve occupied a town. Thousands of them, apparently. They call themselves Followers. They believe their incantations lend them cosmic awareness and that their master will return and start a new dynasty. The police are blockading them and will soon move in and kick the crap out of them. It’s a great story. We should go.
“Won’t they try to stop you?” the duty editor asked, yawning. Well, yes, but we should go anyway.
Harvey was listening, shaking his head, fiddling with lenses.
Mangan and the duty editor haggled over cost. There were admonitions, and promises, and a dash to the airport. Now Mangan and Harvey sat in the back of a maroon taxi, four hours out of Nanchang in China’s damp south, speeding east down route G316.
Mangan watched the towns slip by, brick factories, whitewashed concrete blocks with orange tiled roofs, a market glossy with rain where a woman in blue sold ducks and young toughs leaned on their bicycles. On the walls the political slogan of the moment: Wending yadao yiqie. Stability overrides everything. After the towns, low, rippled green mountains swathed in cloud.
Dusk, and they stopped to eat noodles, steaming and peppery, from a stall by the side of the road. Mangan ate standing, the bowl in one hand, listening to the crickets in the wet air. They forged on, into the night, promising the mystified driver more money if he would keep going.
Mangan tried to remain inconspicuous, but he was six feet, red-haired, green-eyed. They’d picked the taxi for its darkened windows, but if Public Security stopped them, then, well, the usual.