by Gao Xingjian
What had happened to his father nine years earlier also happened to him. He fell into the same trap. Indeed, all he had done was put his signature on a poster. It had on it Chairman Mao’s call—all of you must concern yourselves with the important affairs of the nation—in bold-type print from the People’s Daily. When he was on his way to work, someone was putting up the poster in the big hall downstairs and was soliciting signatures, so he took up a pen and signed his name. He was unaware of the motives of this anti-Party poster nor of the political motives of the person who had written it. He couldn’t work it out, but he had to acknowledge that it was aimed at the Party Center. By signing his name, he lost his bearings as well as a class standpoint. Actually, he had no idea what class he belonged to—after all, he couldn’t count as a member of the proletariat—and so he didn’t have a clear class standpoint. If he didn’t sign this poster then he would have signed a similar poster. He confessed to this. He had, without doubt, committed a political error and from that time on, it was on his file. His personal history was no longer clean.
Prior to that he had truly never thought to oppose the Party. He had no need to oppose anyone and simply hoped that people wouldn’t disrupt him from dreaming. That night rudely awakened him and he could see his precarious situation: a political storm was raging everywhere and if he were to preserve himself he had to lose himself among the common people. He had to say what everyone else said and be able to show that he was the same as everyone else. He had to keep in step to lose himself among the masses, say what was stipulated by the Party, extinguish all doubts, and keep to the slogans. He had to join with colleagues in writing another poster to indicate his support for the Party Center leadership, denounce the previous poster, and admit his error, in order to avoid being labeled anti-Party.
The obedient will survive and the rebellious will perish. In the early morning, the corridors of the building were covered in new posters, there had been a change in the political climate: today was right and yesterday was wrong, people had turned into chameleons. A poster just put up by a political cadre gave him a shock.
“Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade because you have gone against the basic principles of the Party! Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade because you have betrayed Party secrets! Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade because you are an opportunist and have profiteered all this time by concealing your landlord background to worm your way into the revolutionary camp! Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade also because up to now you have sheltered your reactionary father by hiding him in your house to resist the dictatorship of the proletariat! You are a renegade, Liu so-and-so, because your class instincts are taking advantage of this movement. By confusing black with white to deceive the masses, you have jumped out to target the Party Center. You harbor evil motives!”
This inflammatory call for revolutionary action was intimidating. His immediate boss, Old Liu, thus relegated to a different class from everyone, was instantly isolated; he left the crowd around the poster, returned to his department-chief office, and shut the door. When he reemerged, he was no longer smoking his pipe, and no one dared to greet this former department chief.
After a full night of warfare, it had started to get light. He went to the lavatory and washed his face. The cold water revived him and he looked through the window into the distance at the stretch of gray-black roof tiles. People were probably still asleep and dreaming. Only the round top of the White Pagoda had been tinted by dawn and was becoming more and more distinct. For the first time it occurred to him that he probably was a concealed enemy, and if he wanted to go on living he would have to wear a mask.
“Please be careful of the carriage door, the next station is Admiralty.” This had been spoken first in Cantonese and then in English. You had dozed off and gone past your station. The underground in Hong Kong is cleaner than it is in Paris, and Hong Kong and Hong Kong people are orderly, compared to Mainlanders. You will have to get off at the next stop to go back the other way so that you can return to the hotel for a nap. Tonight you don’t know where you will wake up, but it will be in a bed with a foreign woman. You are irredeemable. Now you are not just the enemy, you are careering toward hell. However, memories for him were hell.
8
“Why don’t you tell me about that Chinese girl of yours? How is she?” Margarethe puts down her glass of wine and raises her long black eyelashes, thick with mascara, to look at you across the small round table.
“I don’t know, I suppose she’s still in China,” you mumble, trying to avoid the question.
“Why don’t you get her out? Don’t you ever think about her?” Her eyes are fixed on you.
“That was ten years ago, what’s the point of bringing it up? If it’s not brought up, then it’s forgotten.” You try to say this nonchalantly. What you want right now is to be romantic with her.
“Then how is it that you remembered me? That night, the first night we met in your home?”
“It’s hard to say, sometimes the smallest incident remains clear, yet some other times I can’t remember the names of people I know well, and sometimes I can’t remember what I had been doing for many years—”
“Have you also forgotten her name?”
“Margarethe!” You squeeze her hand and say, “Memories are depressing, let’s talk about something else.”
“Not necessarily, there are also happy memories, especially of people one has loved.”
“Of course, but it’s best to forget what is in the past.” You, in fact, can’t think of the girl’s name and can, instead, only recall pain. Her voice and face have also become blurred.
“Will you forget me, too?”
“When you’re so vibrant, so full of life, how could I forget you?” You look at her eyes under her thick eyelashes, trying to change the subject.
“But her, you’re not saying that she wasn’t?” She doesn’t avoid your eyes and looks directly at you as she says, “She was so young, delicate, lovely, and so sexy. She was sitting right in front of me, clutching her skirt around her legs, the front of her dress hung low and she clearly had nothing on underneath. It was in China, at that time, so it left a very deep impression.”
“When you were knocking on the door, we were probably making love.” Your lips part in a smile, it is best not to be too serious.
“You’ll forget me just the same, and before many years.” She pulls her hand back.
“But this is different, it’s different!” you retort, unable to think of what to say, and not saying anything intelligent.
“For men, it doesn’t matter which woman’s body it is. It’s all the same thing.”
“No!”
But what can you say? Every woman wants to prove she’s different and in that hopeless battle in bed, tries to find love in lust, always thinking that after the physical lust passes something will remain.
In this very fashionable Bar 97 on this little street in Lan Kwai Fong you sit facing her. You are close but there is a small round table between you, and you are trying to catch her eye. Loud rock music is playing, and the howling is in English. White clothing glows in the dark-blue fluorescent lights. The men with ties, mixing drinks behind the counter, and the hostesses are all tall Westerners. Margarethe, dressed all in black, is barely visible except for her bright red lipstick that shines and looks purple in the fluorescent lights. She seems unreal and is utterly stunning.
“Is it simply because I’m a Western woman?” She is staring at you with a slight frown and her voice seems to be coming from far away.
“No, it’s not simply because you’re a Western woman. How can I put it, you’re in every sense a woman whereas she was still a girl.” You seem to be lighthearted and joking.
“How else are we different?” She seems determined to find out everything.
In her unflinching gaze you detect something devious, and say, “She didn’t know how to draw in, she could only give but didn
’t know how to enjoy. . . .”
“Of course, the woman would come to know, sooner or later. . . .” She stops looking at you, and her eyelashes, heavy with mascara, lower.
You think of her pulsating body, stiff but yielding, her moistness, her warmth, and her breathlessness, that all arouse your lust, and you fiercely say you’re thinking of her again.
“No!” She cuts you short. “It’s not me you are thinking about but her. You are only seeking compensation from my body.”
“How can you say this, you are truly beautiful!”
“I don’t believe you.” She looks down and turns the glass with the tips of her fingers. This little movement is very seductive. She looks up and smiles, revealing the gully between her breasts that had been blocked by the shadow of her head, and says, “I’m too fat.”
You start to say no but she stops you, “I’m quite aware of it.”
“Aware of what?”
“I hate this body of mine.” She suddenly turns frosty again, has a sip of wine, and says, “All right, you don’t understand me, you don’t know anything of my past and my life.”
“Then tell me about it!” you coax her. “Of course I want to understand, I want to know everything, everything about you.”
“No, all you want is to have sex with me.”
All right, you can only try to wheedle your way out. “There’s nothing bad about that, people have to go on living, the important thing is to be living in this instant. What has happened is in the past, there has to be a clean break.”
“But there can’t be a clean break. No, there can’t be!” she insists.
“What if I have?” You wince. She is a serious woman, she was probably good at mathematics in middle school.
“No, you can’t cut off memories, they remain submerged in your heart and from time to time they gush out. Of course, it’s painful, but it can also give you strength.”
You say that memories may give her strength but for you they are the same as nightmares.
“Dreams aren’t real but memories are events that have actually happened and can’t be erased.” This is how she argues.
“Of course, and moreover, they haven’t necessarily gone into the past.” You give a sigh, and go along with her argument.
“They can resurface any time if you don’t guard against them. Fascism is like that. If no one talks about it, doesn’t expose it, doesn’t condemn it, it can come back to life again!” She becomes agitated as she speaks and it is as if the suffering of each and every Jew weighs upon her.
“Then do you need to suffer?” you ask.
“It’s not a question of need. The pain actually exists.”
“So, do you want to take all of humankind’s sufferings upon yourself? Or at least the sufferings of the Jewish race?” you respond.
“No, that race ceased to exist a long time ago, it has scattered all over the world. I am simply a Jew.”
“Isn’t that better? It’s more like a person.”
She needs to affirm her background, and what can you say to that? What you want is precisely to remove the China label from yourself. You don’t play the role of Christ, and don’t take the weight of the cross of the race upon yourself, and you’re lucky enough not to have been crushed to death. She’s too immature to discuss politics and too intelligent to be a woman. Of course, you don’t say the last two things out loud.
A few trendy Hong Kong teenagers arrive. Some of them have their hair tied in ponytails, but they are all men. The tall blond waitress seats them at the table next to yours. One of them says something to the woman, but the music is too loud, and she has to bend down. After listening, she smiles, showing her white teeth that glow in the fluorescent lights, and then moves another small, round table: apparently others are coming. A male couple, gently stroking each other’s hands, is ordering drinks.
“After 1997, will they still let homosexuals meet publicly like this?” she moves close and asks in your ear.
“In China, it’s not just a matter of not being able to meet publicly. If homosexuals are discovered, they are rounded up as vagrants and sent off to labor camps, or even executed.” You had seen some Cultural Revolution cases in internal publications from the Public Security Office.
She moves away and leans back but doesn’t say anything. The music is very loud.
“Shall we go out for a walk in the street?” you suggest.
She pushes away the almost empty glass and stands up. Both of you go out the door. The little street, a blaze of neon lights, is thronging with people. There are bars one after another, as well as some elegant cake shops and small restaurants.
“Will this bar still exist?” She is obviously asking about after 1997.
“Who knows? It’s all business, as long as they can make a profit. The people here are like that, they don’t have the guilt complex of the Germans,” you say.
“Do you think all Germans have a guilt complex? After the Tiananmen events of 1989, the Germans kept doing business with China.”
“Do you mind if we don’t discuss politics?” you ask.
“But you can’t escape politics,” she says.
“Could we escape for a little while?” you ask her very politely and with the hint of a smile.
She looks at you, laughs, and says, “All right, let’s have something to eat. I’m a little hungry.”
“Chinese food or Western food?”
“Chinese food, of course. I like Hong Kong, it’s always so full of life, and the food is good and cheap.”
You take her into a small, brightly lit restaurant, crowded and noisy with customers. She addresses the fat waiter in Chinese, and you order some local dishes and a bottle of Shaoxing rice liquor. The waiter brings a bottle of Huadiao in a pot of hot water, puts down the pot as well as two cups, each containing a pickled plum. He says with a chuckle, “This young woman’s Chinese is really—” He puts a thumb up and says, “Wonderful! Wonderful!”
She’s pleased and says to you, “Germany is too lonely. I like it in China. In Germany, there is so much snow in winter, and, going home, there is hardly anyone on the streets, they’re all shut up in their houses. Of course, the houses are large and not like they are in China, and there aren’t the problems you’ve mentioned. I live on the top floor in Frankfurt, and it’s the whole floor. If you come, you can stay at my place, there’ll be a room for you.”
“Won’t I be in your room?”
“We’re just friends,” she says.
When you come out of the restaurant, there’s a puddle on the road, so you walk to the right and she to the left, and the two of you walk with a distance between you. Your relationships with women have never been smooth, you always hit a snag and are left stranded. Probably nothing can help you. Getting someone into bed is easy, but understanding the person is difficult, and there are only ever chance encounters that provide temporary relief from the loneliness.
“I don’t want to go back to the hotel right away, let’s take a walk,” she says.
Behind big front windows, the bar by the footpath is dimly lit and people are sitting around small tables with candles.
“Shall we go in?” you ask. “Or would you like to go somewhere by the sea where it will be more romantic?”
“I was born in Venice, so I grew up by the sea,” she replies.
“Then you should count as Italian. That’s a beautiful city, always bright and sunny.”
You want to ease the tension and say that you have been to Piazza San Marco. At midnight, the bars and restaurants on both sides of the square were crowded, and musicians were playing in the open air on the side near the sea. You remember they were playing Ravel’s Bolero and it drifted through the night scene. The girls in the square bought fluorescent bands from peddlers and wore them on their wrists, around their necks, in their hair, so green lights were moving everywhere. Beneath the stone bridges going out to sea, couples sat or lay in gondolas, some with little lanterns on their tall prows, and, rowe
d slowly by the boatmen, they glided toward the black, smooth surface of the sea. Hong Kong lacks this elegance but it is a paradise for food, drink, and commodities.
“All that’s for the tourists,” she says. “Did you go as a tourist?”
“I couldn’t afford to be a tourist. I had been invited by an Italian writers’ organization. I thought at the time it would be good to settle in Venice and find myself an Italian woman.”
“It’s a dead city with no vitality, which relies on tourists to keep going, it has no life,” she cuts in.
“Still, people there lead happy lives.”
You say that when you got back to the hotel, it was well after midnight, and no one was on the streets. In front of the hotel, two Italian girls were amusing themselves by dancing around a tape recorder on the ground. You watched them for quite some time; they were really happy and even tried to get you to talk and laugh with them. They were talking in Italian, and, even though you couldn’t understand them, you could tell they were not tourists.
“Just as well you couldn’t understand them, they were just baiting you,” she says coldly, “they were a couple of prostitutes.”
“Probably,” you say, thinking back, “but they seemed passionate and very lovely.”
“Italians are all passionate, but it’s hard to say if those women were lovely.”
“Aren’t you being overly critical?” you say.
“You didn’t hire them?” she asks instead.
