Beijing Coma by Ma Jian Page A

the National Opera Company’s orchestra.’ I didn’t want to disclose that he’d been branded a rightist. It was very dark inside the low-ceilinged brick hut. I turned my eyes to the brightness outside the window. There was so much dust on the panes that everything looked blurred. Most of the sky was hidden by a row of brick huts.
    ‘Was he the rightist who played the violin?’ As the thought came to his mind, the wrinkles above his eyebrows twitched for a moment.
    ‘Did you know him?’
    ‘Yes. I remember many of the inmates of that farm. Your father came to visit me once, when he was ill. He had a stomach inflammation. He’d developed the condition in the Gansu labour camp. How is he now?’
    ‘He died three years ago, from stomach cancer. Just a year after his final release.’ After these words left my mouth, my throat felt sore and dry.
    ‘Was his rightist label removed?’
    ‘Yes, a few months before he died. Did you know Director Liu, the farm’s education officer?’
    ‘It’s a good thing your father was transferred to Shandong,’ Dr Song murmured, looking away. It was as if he was speaking to himself.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He might have been eaten, eaten like the others.’
    He spoke so softly that it was hard for me to fully understand what he was saying.
    ‘They ate Director Liu,’ he mumbled. ‘When we went to inspect the farm last month, we retrieved two dried human livers from a peasant who lives nearby. He’d kept them all these years. Whenever he fell ill, he’d break off a small piece and make medicinal tonics with it. One of the livers belonged to Director Liu. Although it had dried out, it was still about this big.’ He looked up at me and gestured the size with his hands.
    ‘They ate him?’ I remembered a passage in my father’s journal that described an act of cannibalism he’d witnessed in the Gansu camp: ‘Three days after Jiang died of starvation, Hu and Gao secretly sliced some flesh from the buttock and thigh of his corpse and roasted it on a fire. They didn’t expect Jiang’s wife to turn up in the camp the next day and ask to see the corpse. She wept for hours, hugging his mutilated body in her arms.’ As the image shot back into my mind, my teeth began to chatter.
    ‘You’re still young. You haven’t seen much of the world. I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
    ‘I’m a biology student, and have taken courses in medicine, so I’m not easily shocked. But I just can’t imagine how anyone could bring themselves to eat another human being. My father told me that, of the three thousand rightists sent to the Gansu reform-through-labour camp, 1,700 died of starvation. Sometimes the survivors became so famished that they had to resort to eating the corpses.’
    Dr Song walked over to the locked cabinet, picked up the two thermos flasks that were resting on top of it, gave them a shake, removed the stopper from one of them and poured some hot water into an empty cup. Then he brought out a small canister of tea, scooped out some leaves, dropped them into the hot water and placed a lid on the cup.
    ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said, taking the cup from him. I wanted to swallow a large gulp, but the water was too hot.
    ‘Here in Guangxi it wasn’t starvation that drove people to cannibalism. It was hatred.’
    I didn’t know what he meant.
    ‘It was in 1968, one of the most violent years of the Cultural Revolution. In Guangxi, it wasn’t enough just to kill class enemies, the local revolutionary committees forced the people to eat them as well. In the beginning, the enemies’ corpses were simmered in large vats together with legs of pork. But as the campaign progressed, there were too many corpses to deal with, so only the heart, liver and brain were cooked.’
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
    I pictured my father’s body just before he died, and was relieved to think that it had been intact and unharmed.
    ‘There were so many enemies. If your father hadn’t