Free Beijing Coma by Ma Jian Page B

months. So she said to me, ‘ Lust for Life isn’t selling very well in Hong Kong. I could easily get my hands on a copy. I’ll buy you one next time I go.’
    After that, she often brought back books for me which were hard to get hold of in mainland China.
    Although your cells and nerves are no longer interacting properly, the signal transmission mechanism is still functioning, allowing physical traces of past events to reappear in your mind.
    ‘Fuck you! Of course I know who Freud is! I read about him ages ago.’
    Wang Fei was sitting on the bunk above me, dangling his legs over the edge. The pale skin of his calves was covered with fine, black hairs. His toes, which hung like fleshy hooks at the end of his feet, clenched whenever he spoke. He was born in Wanxian County in Sichuan Province. There was a rumour that he came from a peasant family, but he claimed he had an urban residence permit, and that his parents owned a colour television. He spoke with a thick Sichuan accent, and whenever he got worked up about something, he’d slip back into his local dialect. Like me, he felt great anger about the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, and he enjoyed speculating on the inside story of Lin Biao’s conflicts with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing.
    ‘Tell me which country Freud was from then!’ Mou Sen replied, unconvinced. He ran his eyes down the index of the book in his hands and read out, ‘The hat as a symbol of the male genitals . . . Being run over as a symbol of sexual intercourse . . . The male organ symbolised by persons and the female by a landscape . . .’
    That was the day I first heard of Freud, his book The Interpretation of Dreams and the terms ‘sexual repression’ and the ‘unconscious mind’.
    ‘That sounds interesting! Let me have a look!’ Wang Fei lowered himself off his bunk and plonked his foot on my bed.
    If Mou Sen wanted to read something, that meant it was good. He had the largest collection of books on our floor of the dorm block. They were stacked up, two books deep, against the wall next to his bed. When he acquired new books and couldn’t find space for them next to the wall, he’d stuff them under his pillow, or under the folded quilt by his feet. I never saw him without a book in his hands. His father had been a writer, and, like mine, had been denounced as a rightist and confined in a labour camp for twenty years. After his father was released, he forced Mou Sen to major in science, arguing that literature was a dangerous subject, but this didn’t dampen Mou Sen’s voracious appetite for novels and poetry. Mou Sen’s great-great-grandfather had been a famous scholar during the Qing Dynasty, and had been granted the honour of flying outside his home a flag stamped with the emperor’s seal.
    Mou Sen had passed on to me The Red and the Black , The Old Man and the Sea and One Hundred Years of Solitude , and although I didn’t have a deep understanding of literature, I enjoyed them very much.
    Sun Chunlin was standing in the middle of the dorm. His shirt was buttoned to the top. The collar was too tight. He picked up a thermos flask and poured some more water into his cup of green tea. As he took a large gulp from it, sweat streamed down the back of his neck. He was too priggish to ever remove his shirt. I had no inhibitions, though. As soon as I returned to our dorm after classes, I’d strip down to my Y-fronts or wander off to the washroom completely naked. If a girl came in to talk to someone, I’d wrap a towel around my waist.
    It was July, and the temperature had soared to forty degrees. I didn’t have any appetite for lunch, so I just sprawled myself out over the reed mat on my bed. We had completed most of our exams, so the pressure had eased a little. Usually, you could hear other students in the building playing English language cassette tapes, or revising in the washroom or toilets. But today we were all lying on our beds, panting in the stifling heat like