by Gao Xingjian
Early the next morning, at five o’clock, he went to the hutong where Wang Qi lived, and checked out the number of the house. The nail-studded old-style gate was shut tight. It was quiet in the hutong, and no one was around, although the breakfast vendor at the entrance to the hutong was already open for business. He drank a bowl of very hot soy milk and ate a fried bun, fresh out of the oil, but still didn’t see a familiar face. It was only after he had bought his second bowl of soy milk and eaten another fried bun, that Big Li arrived on his bicycle. He waved and called out to him. Big Li got off his bicycle and shook his hand like an old friend.
“You’re back? We really need you,” Big Li said, then went up close and said quietly, “Old Liu’s been relocated, he’s been hidden. When they get there, they won’t find anyone.”
Looking quite haggard, Big Li was obviously sincere; their former rivalry had suddenly vanished. Their relationship was very much like that of the children’s gangs in the lanes and alleys, but with an additional element of loyalty. However, the hypocrisy that existed in comrade relationships was absent. In this chaotic world, gangs and groups had to be formed so that there was something for people to rely on.
Big Li added, “I’ve contacted a fire-fighting detachment, the chief is a good friend, if there’s a fight, I’ll only have to make a phone call, and a whole bunch of firefighters will be there in their fire engine. They’ll turn their hoses on what goes hard between the legs of those guys!”
At about six o’clock, Little Yu and six or seven youths from the workplace arrived at the entrance of the hutong, and they went up together to Wang Qi’s gate where they stood leaning on their bikes and dangling cigarettes in their lips. Two small cars entered the hutong and stopped more than thirty meters away, they were cars from the workplace but no one got out. They confronted one another like this for four or five minutes, then the cars reversed, turned around, and drove off.
“Let’s go in and see Comrade Wang Qi,” he said.
Big Li hesitated and said, “Her husband’s a reactionary.”
“It’s not her husband we’re coming to see.” He led them in.
The former bureau chief came out to greet them and said over and over, “Thank you for coming, comrades. Come in and sit down, come in and sit down!”
Wang Qi’s husband, former theorist for the Party and now an anti-Party reactionary rejected by the Party, a small, thin, old man, acknowledged them with a nod. The doors of the two adjoining rooms had seals pasted on them, and there was nowhere for him to go, so he just paced back and forth, chain-smoking and coughing.
“Comrades, you probably haven’t eaten. I’ll go and make some breakfast,” Wang Qi said.
“There’s no need, we’ve just eaten at the entrance to the hutong. Comrade Wang Qi, we’ve only dropped in for a visit. Their cars have gone, and they won’t be coming back,” he said.
“Then let me make some tea for all of you. . . .” She was a woman, after all; this former bureau chief held back tears as she quickly turned away.
Just like that, things inexplicably changed, and he was protecting the wife of an “anti-Party reactionary.” When Wang Qi was in her job, she had cautioned him for having too close a relationship with Lin, but that pressure had dissipated long ago, and, compared with the string of events that had happened since, hardly counted as anything. Nevertheless, he was grateful to her for being lenient and not following up on his affair with Lin. Now, it could be said, he had repaid her.
While he, Big Li and the others drank tea made by the revolutionary cadre Wang Qi, the wife of a reactionary, they held a meeting on the spot and resolved to establish a dare-to-die group with those present forming the core members. If Danian’s crowd tried to haul out and denounce their cadres, they would go forth and protect them.
Nevertheless, when armed fighting broke out, Wang Qi was hauled out by Danian’s mob, and was to be denounced in the office. The corridors were crammed, and the office turned into a battlefield, with people jumping onto the desks and shattering the plate-glass covers on them. He couldn’t retreat and was pushed inside, so he also stood on a desk to confront Danian.
“Drag him down, that fuckin’ offspring of a bitch!” Danian ordered his mob of old Red Guards, not attempting to disguise their genealogical enmity.
He knew that if he showed any sign of weakness, they would set upon him and beat him up until they had maimed him. They would then dig up everything in his father’s unsettled case to trump up a charge of class revenge against him. The people in his faction, inside and outside the office, were mostly gentle, frail, elderly bureaucrats and intellectuals, and most of the cadres were also from literary backgrounds. All of their families had problems, like his own. They certainly wouldn’t be able to save him and moreover, wanted young people like him to come forward to oppose Danian’s faction.
“Hey, listen! Danian, I’m warning you, we’ve got a gang, too, and the guys in our gang aren’t short of fuel to burn. Any of you dare to make a move, and we’ll serve up the whole lot of you on a platter tonight! You can believe us or not!” he, too, roared out.
When people become animals, their primitive instincts return; wolves and dogs both bare their teeth. He had to be menacing, his eyes had to look fierce, and he had to make this quite clear to the other party. He was a desperado who was capable of anything, and, at that time, he probably looked very much like a bandit.
There was the sound of fire-engine sirens down below. Big Li had got help just in time. The helmeted fire-fighting detachment, followed by the brother rebel group from the print factory in a truck, had arrived. They entered the building with a big flag in a show of might. Each faction had its own strategies, and this was how armed battles flared up in the universities, factories, and workplaces. If they were backed by the army then guns and cannons were deployed.
33
He first read it in a stenciled pamphlet. Mao had received the rebel-faction heads of the five universities of Beijing in the Great Hall of the People, and said, “You, little generals, have now committed errors.” It was like the emperor saying to his generals that it was now time for them to step down. The “little general” Kuai Dafu, who had distinguished himself in purging old revolutionary warriors on behalf of the Commander-in-Chief, proving himself as a student leader, immediately understood the implications and broke into tears. The old man had used a poster at Peking University to ignite the flames of the Cultural Revolution, and now, to extinguish that mass movement he had initiated, he again started on a university campus. Half a million workers directed by Mao’s security corps drove onto the campus of Tsinghua University.
That afternoon, on hearing this news, he rushed there and was witness to workers, led by army personnel, taking the solitary building opposite the gymnasium, the last stronghold of the earliest university rebel group, the Jinggang Mountain Militia. Worker propaganda teams, wearing red armbands, sat on the ground side by side, in circle upon circle around the building and the sports field, for a considerable distance. In the last rays of the setting sun, two big red banners were lowered from the windows of the top floor. Written on them in black were the words: “Plum blossoms flower in the snow unvanquished, Jinggang Mountain people are brave enough to ascend the scaffold!” Each of the words was larger than a window, and the banners stretching several floors down swayed in the wind. A group of forty or fifty army personnel and workers crossed the space in front of the building, went up the steps to the main door, then, after a while, finally went in and cut off the water and electricity. He mingled with the crowd of thousands of workers and onlookers watching in silence, and he could hear the two banners flapping in the wind.
After almost an hour, the big red banner on the right dropped from the top of the building and slowly floated down. As it fell on the stairs at the front of the building, the other banner also dropped. Instantly, shouts of “long live” went up from the crowds. Then the loudspeakers, drums, and cymbals of the worker propaganda teams started up in ful
l force. The students who had also shouted “long live” when they were rebelling, now held a white flag as they filed out like surrendering prisoners of war with their hands raised and head bowed. An even larger number of workers entered the building, dragging out several heavy machine guns, as well as wheeling out a flat trajectory gun that didn’t seem to have any ammunition.
It was a simple takeover, although on the previous night, when the worker propaganda team drove onto the campus, students had thrown a homemade hand grenade in the dark and injured several workers. This was probably an act of frustration. The Great Leader they were protecting had finished using them and had discarded them. Children discovering an adult has tricked them throw tantrums; it was nothing more than that.
He realized that the chaos would soon come to an end, and could see that his own fate would not be any better. So, on the pretext of doing a survey, he immediately left Beijing again.
“Go back!”
When he visited his maternal uncle on his way through Shanghai, he received his first warning.
“Go back where?” he asked. He told his uncle about his problem, the unsettled case of his father’s hidden gun. “Even if I had a home, I wouldn’t be able to go back!”
Hearing this, his uncle started coughing, and, taking out his inhaler, sprayed it down his throat.
“Go back to your workplace and just get on with your job!”
“The whole workplace is paralyzed and there’s nothing to do. So, by saying that I was conducting an investigation, I was able to leave Beijing and do a bit of traveling.”
“What investigation?”
“Aren’t they investigating old cadres? I’ve investigated the histories of some old cadres and have discovered that it’s not at all so—”
“What do you know? This is no game, you’re not a child anymore, don’t lose your head without knowing how you lost it!”
His uncle wanted to cough again, and sprayed his inhaler down his throat again.
“It’s impossible to read anything, and there’s nothing to do.”
“Observe, can’t you observe?” His uncle said, “I’m an observer. I close my door and don’t go out. I don’t join any faction and just watch the circular enactment of people rising to power and falling from power.”
“But I have to go to work. I’m not like you, Uncle, you can stay at home because you have to convalesce,” he said.
“You can keep your mouth shut, can’t you?” his uncle retorted. “Your mouth is on your own head!”
“Uncle, you’ve been convalescing at home for a long time. You don’t know that once a campaign starts, you have to take a stance. It’s impossible not to get swept up in it!”
This old revolutionary uncle of his, of course, knew very well, and gave a long sigh. “These are chaotic times. In the past, people could hide in the old forests on remote mountains or go to a monastery and become monks. . . .”
Only then was his uncle quite frank with him: it was the first time they discussed politics together. No longer treating him as a child, his uncle said, “I’ve had to use my illness to escape the winds of political change. Following the Great Leap Forward, antirightist tendencies in the inner Party became entrenched, and since then, I have stood aside. I’ve not involved myself with what has been happening for seven or eight years, and only through this have I been able to prolong my feeble life.”
His uncle also spoke about his former commander, Yuan, who was in the upper echelons of the Party. During the Civil War, he and Yuan were willing to die for one another. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Yuan paid him a visit when passing through. He sent the guard outside and told his uncle, “Something big is about to happen in the Party Center, and it is unlikely that we will meet again.” He left behind a brocaded bedcover and said it was to commemorate their final farewell.
“Tell your father that no one can save anyone; get him to do whatever he can to protect himself!”
These were the last words his uncle said to him as he escorted him to the door. Not too long afterward, this uncle, who was not very old, came down with influenza and was admitted to the army hospital where he had an injection. A few hours later, he was wheeled into the morgue. His former commander, that revolutionary Yuan Xun, who had been incarcerated, also died a year later in the army hospital. But it was many years later that he read about this in a memorial article exonerating Yuan. As revolutionaries in those very early days, they could not have imagined that, even without making a bid to seize power, they, too, would see themselves staring death in the face because of the revolution. It was impossible to know whether or not they had regrets.
* * *
Then why did you rebel? Did you go up to the grinding machine to ensure that there would be plenty of mincemeat filling for pancakes? Looking back on those times, you can’t help asking him.
He says he had no choice, circumstances did not allow a person to be a dispassionate observer, and he knew he was just a pawn in the movement. He suffered terribly, not because he was fighting for the Commander-in-Chief, but simply in order to exist.
Then couldn’t you have found some other means for just surviving? For example, by simply being an obedient citizen, going with the flow, living for today and not being concerned about tomorrow, changing with the political climate, saying what people wanted to hear, pledging allegiance to whoever was in power? you ask.
He says that was even harder, it needed much more effort than being a rebel. It needed much more thinking; one needed to be constantly working out the unpredictable weather, and could a person accurately predict heaven’s temperament and mood? His father was one of the common people and he did just that, and when it came to the crunch, he ended up swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. His father’s demise was not very different from his old revolutionary maternal uncle’s. There was no clear goal to his rebelling. It was simply due to his instinct to live, but he was like a praying mantis putting up a foreleg to stop a cart.
Then, perhaps, you were born a rebel, or at least born with a rebellious streak?
No, he says, he was gentle by nature, like his father. It was just that he was young, at an impressionable age, and very inexperienced. He couldn’t follow the road of his father’s generation, but didn’t know what road to take.
Couldn’t you have escaped?
Where could he escape to, he asks you instead. He couldn’t escape from this huge country, and he couldn’t leave that big beehive-like workplace where he got his salary. That beehive allocated his city residence permit, his monthly grain coupons (fourteen kilos), oil coupons (half a kilo), sugar coupons (quarter of a kilo), meat coupons (half a kilo). It also issued his annual fabric coupons (nine meters), his salary scalebased industrial certificates (2.05 certificates) for buying a watch, a bicycle, or everyday commodities such as wool, and even determined his citizen status. If he, this worker-bee, left the beehive, where could he fly? He says there was no other option, he was just a bee whose refuge was this hive. As the hive was infected with madness, what else was there to do except wildly buzz around, attacking one another?
But did wildly buzzing around save your life? you ask.
He was already buzzing around. If he’d known all this earlier, he wouldn’t have been an insect. He smiles sardonically.
An insect that can smile is somehow grotesque. You go right up to take a good look at him.
It’s the world that is grotesque, not the insect that has taken refuge in the hive, the insect says.
34
Beyond the pass at Shanhaiguan it got cold early, and he had run into chilly winds blowing down from the northwest. The bicycle, hired in the county town, was impossible to ride against the wind, and even pushing it was hard. At four o’clock in the afternoon it was already dark, when he reached the place where the commune was located, but the village he was going to was a further ten kilometers away. He decided to stay the night in the cart station, where the peasants stopped for a break with their donkey- and hors
e-carts. He forced himself to eat a bowl of hard sorghum along with the two strips of salted turnip that had gone bitter, then stretched out on the woven rush mat on the earthen kang. In weather like this, the villagers didn’t take their carts out, so he had to himself a communal kang that could accommodate seven or eight people. His letter of introduction from the nation’s capital seemed to have made an impression, because a special effort had been made to heat the kang for him. However, as the night wore on, it got so hot that the lice on him were probably oozing oil. Even after he had taken off everything except his underpants, he was still sweating, so he got up, sat on the edge of the kang, and smoked, as he pondered the real possibility of seeking refuge somewhere in a village during these chaotic times.
He was up early. There was still a strong north wind, so, leaving the clumsy, heavy-duty bicycle at the cart station, he set off on foot against the wind, and, after three hours, arrived at the village. He asked from house to house whether there was an elderly woman with such-and-such a surname who was a primary school teacher. People all shook their heads. There was a primary school in the village with one teacher, a man, but his wife had given birth and he had gone home to look after her.
“Who else is at the school?” he asked.
“There hasn’t been a class for more than two years. It wasn’t really a school, so the production brigade converted it into a storehouse. It’s piled high with sweet potatoes!” the villagers said.
At this point, he asked for the Party secretary of the production brigade, to get someone in charge.
“The old one or the young one?”
He said he wanted a villager who was in charge, so, naturally, the old one was better, he would be sure to know about things. He was taken there. The old man, a bamboo pipe clamped in his teeth, was weaving a rattan basket. Without letting him explain why he had come, the old man mumbled, “I’m not in charge, I’m not in charge!”
