Night Heron (2 page)

And then Peanut told the little political to write a letter, to address it to “foreign journalists.” In Beijing. There were lots of
them, he said, and they lived in a big compound near Altar of the Sun Park. So the two prisoners composed a letter, and the little political, in spidery characters blotched with tears, told of the terror and degradation that was labor reform, spiced up a bit, and Peanut got it smuggled out in the laundry run and sent to Beijing. And some foreign newspaper printed it! Big exposé!
Horrors of China’s Gulag!
And, soon after, inspection teams showed up, and the thunders’ faces were a treat.

Now, as Peanut pointed out, the higher-ups did not care one whit about conditions in labor reform, or beatings, or whether the little political lived or died. But they cared that they had been humiliated by foreigners. And they were going to make everyone else in the Labour Reform Bureau care too. The little political was given a cushy job in the kitchen, and no one said a word, and Peanut just looked at the thunders with a knowing expression, an I-can-fuck-you-up-if-I-try expression.

How the hell did Peanut know about foreign journalists, anyway?

7775 lay in the fetid air of the barracks, the night pressing in on him, listening to the whispered breathing of the other prisoners. He clutched at his blanket and thought of a home he’d once had and a little girl in pigtails cracking sunflower seeds with her teeth. Her face was almost gone now. He pawed away the desperation.

7775 wouldn’t turn Peanut in.

Not yet, anyway. Wait another hour.

He was on the slope now, heading into the hills, the ground less stony, a little easier. The darkness was holding, and it was colder, traces of snow on the ground. Exhaustion took his mind in discursive, pointless directions. He wondered idly if he was leaving scent, if they even had dogs. He’d never seen a dog in the camp. Any dog to come within range of Production Squad 20
would have been beaten to death and grilled with the cumin that 1414’s mother sent. 1414—
yao si yao si.
It wasn’t his number; it just rhymed with
want to die, want to die
, which was what he shouted at night, and it stuck. Early on 1414 had been in the shackles, hands chained to the waist, and a wooden bar two feet long affixed each end to an ankle, so that when he walked each foot described a half-circle. A couple of the Christians had fed him and wiped his arse.

Peanut stopped, breathing heavily, and looked behind him. He was gaining height. He saw the lights of the prison camp across the plain, faint now, silver in the night. No sound, no activity, yet. No trucks. Of course no one escaped. Where the hell would anyone go? He looked up again, breathing hard. The slope would steepen, he knew, and then he’d almost be there. Move.

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.