by Gao Xingjian
It was only after he said that he had come specially from Beijing to carry out an investigation, that the old man became respectful and put down his work. Holding the bronze bowl of his pipe and exposing his brown-black teeth, his eyes narrowed as he listened to him explain the situation.
“Oh, yes, there is such a person, the wife of old man Liang. She taught at the primary school, but she retired because of illness, a long time ago. People have been here to investigate her, but her husband is a shadow-play singer with a poor-peasant family background, so there weren’t any problems!”
He explained that he was looking for this old man’s wife because he was doing an investigation on another person, that it didn’t actually concern the woman herself. At this, the old man took him to a house on the outskirts of the village. At the front door, he shouted out, “Old man Liang, your wife!”
There was no answer. The old man pushed open the door. No one was there, so, turning to the village children who had followed behind, he said, “Go quickly and fetch her, a comrade from Beijing is waiting for her in the house!”
The children dashed off, shouting as they ran. The old man also left.
The walls of the main room were gray-black from smoke, just like the square table and two wooden benches, the only furniture in the room. The kitchen adjoined, but the fire was not burning, so, feeling extremely cold, he sat down. It was gloomy outside, although the wind had died down. He stamped his feet trying to get warm, but, after a long wait, there was still no sign of anyone.
He thought about his waiting in this destitute, faraway village for the former wife of a high official. What could have made her settle in this village? Why had she become the wife of a poor peasant, a shadow-play singer? But what did this have to do with him? It was simply to delay his return to Beijing.
After almost two hours, an old woman appeared. Seeing him inside the house, she hesitated, stopped, but finally came in. The old woman wore a gray scarf around her head, a dark-gray padded jacket, an old pair of padded crotchless overtrousers that puffed out because they were tied at the ankles, and a pair of grimy black padded shoes. Could this genuine old peasant woman be the revolutionary hero of those times, who had been educated at a prestigious university and had worked in intelligence? He got to his feet and asked if she was Comrade Such-and-Such.
“No such person!” the old woman instantly said with a dismissive wave.
This gave him a shock, but he went on to ask, “Are you also known as . . . ?” He repeated the name.
“My surname is the same as my husband’s, Liang!”
“Is your husband a shadow-play singer?” he asked.
“He’s very old and stopped singing a long time ago.”
“Is he here?” he asked cautiously.
“He’s out. Who, in fact, are you looking for?” the old woman retorted, as she took off her scarf and put it on the table.
“Forty years ago, did you stay in Sichuan? Did you know someone called . . . ?” He said the name of the high official.
The woman’s eyes lit up, but her sagging eyelids immediately drooped again. Those were not the eyes of an ignorant village woman.
“You even had a child by him!” Having blurted this out, he had to calm the woman.
“The child died a long time ago,” the woman said, as she rested her hands on the table and sat down on the bench.
It was her. He felt he should try to console her, “You did much work for the Party, but old revolutionaries—”
The woman cut him short, “I didn’t do anything, I just cared for my husband and gave birth to a daughter.”
“Your husband of that time was secretary of a special zone of the underground Party, surely you were aware of this?”
“I wasn’t a member of the Communist Party!”
“But your husband, your husband at the time, was involved in the secret activities of the Party. Surely you knew about this?”
“I didn’t,” she insisted.
“It was you who covered his escape and, by giving a secret signal, also helped his contact to escape and not get arrested. You were very brave!”
“I don’t know anything about this, I didn’t do anything,” she adamantly denied.
“Do I need to provide you with details to help you remember? You lived on the first floor, and there was a rattan fan hanging at the window overlooking the street. At the time, you went to the window and took down the fan, you were holding a baby in your arms. . . .” He waited for her response.
“I don’t remember any of that.” The old woman closed her eyes and ignored him.
He went on coaxing her, “There are testimonies from the people involved, written documents. Your husband, your former husband, escaped by climbing from the clothes-drying porch at the back. He has written a statement on this, it was a meritorious act that you carried out for the revolution.”
The woman snorted and gave a little laugh.
“You covered your husband’s escape, but you yourself were arrested by undercover spies lying in ambush!” he exclaimed with a sigh. This was a ploy often used in investigations.
Her eyes wide-open, the woman suddenly asked in a loud voice, “If you know everything, why are you carrying out this investigation?”
At this he explained, “Don’t get upset, you’re not under investigation and neither is your former husband. You covered his escape, so he wasn’t arrested, all that is clearly documented. What I want to find out about is the other underground Party member. He was later arrested, had nothing to do with you, but was put in the same prison. How did he get out? According to his statement, the Party organization saved him. Could you tell me something about the situation?”
“I’ve already told you, I was not a Party member, so don’t ask me whether or not the Party saved him.”
“I’m asking about the situation in the prison. For example, when a person was released, were certain procedures adopted?”
“Why don’t you go and ask the guards at the prison? Go and ask the Nationalist Party! I was a woman locked in a big prison while still nursing a baby at my breast!”
The woman lost her temper and started banging the table like an old village woman in a fit of rage.
Of course, he, too, could have lost his temper. At the time, the relationship between an investigator and a person being investigated was like an interrogation: like between a judge and the accused, or even between a warden and the prisoner. However, he forced himself to say calmly that he had not come to investigate how she came to be released. He was asking her to provide information on general procedures at the prison. For example, were there special procedures for the release of political prisoners?
“I was not a political prisoner!” the woman said categorically.
He said he was willing to believe that she was not a member of the Party and that she had been implicated because of her husband, he believed all this. But he did not want to, and there was no need for him to, have difficulties with her. However, since he had come to carry out an investigation, he asked her to make a statement.
“If you don’t know anything about it, then just write that you don’t know. I’m sorry I’ve disturbed you, and the investigation will finish here.” He first made this quite clear.
“I can’t write anything,” the woman said.
“Weren’t you a teacher? And, it seems, that you also went to university.”
“There’s nothing to write.” She refused.
In other words, she was not willing to leave any documentation about that part of her life. It was because she did not want people to know her background that she had hidden herself in this village to spend the rest of her days with a peasant shadow-play singer, he thought.
“Have you ever tried to see him?” He was asking about her former husband, the high official.
The woman declined to comment.
“Does he know you’re still alive?”
The woman remained silent and made no response. He could do noth
ing more, so he capped his pen and put it into his pocket.
“When did your child die?” he asked as a matter of course, as he got up.
“In prison, it was just one month old. . . .” The old woman abruptly stopped and also got up from the bench.
He did not pursue the matter, and put on his padded gloves. The old woman silently escorted him out the door. He nodded his head to her in farewell.
When he got to the dirt road with two deep wheel ruts and looked back, the old woman was still standing at the door, without her scarf. Seeing him turn, she went back inside the house.
On his way back, the wind changed; this time it blew in from the northeast. It began snowing more and more heavily, so that, with the grain harvested, everything became a vast bare plain. The snowflakes filling the sky came straight at him, and it was hard to keep his eyes open, but he got back to the cart station before dark and collected the rented bicycle he had left there. Although he didn’t have to get back to the county town that night, for some reason, he quickly got on the bicycle. The dirt road and the fields were blanketed in thick snow, and he could barely make out the road. The wind blew from behind, sweeping the snow in all directions, but, at least, it was blowing in the right direction. Gripping the handlebars tightly, he bounced up and down in the snow-covered ruts of the road. From time to time, the bicycle and the rider would fall into the snow, but he would pick himself up and get back on the bicycle to continue on, unsteadily. Lashed up by the wind, it was all swirling snow before him, everything was a vast expanse of gray. . . .
35
“You clown!” the former lieutenant colonel rebuked him, but he was now the favorite of the Army Control Commission. He was also the deputy leader of the team in charge of purifying class ranks, although, of course, army personnel were actually in charge.
You really were a clown. You were a bean made to jump helplessly in the all-embracing sieve of the totalitarian dictatorship, but you didn’t jump out of the sieve, because you didn’t want to get smashed up.
You had to welcome being controlled by army personnel, just like you had to take part in the parades to cheer each of Mao’s latest string of directives released on the radio news at night. As soon as the slogans had been written, people assembled, formed ranks, and began marching on the streets, usually until midnight. To gongs and drums and the shouting of slogans, one contingent after another marched across Chang’an Avenue from the west, as one contingent after another marched across from the east, each on parade for the other. You had also to be enthusiastic and not let others see that you were worried.
You certainly were a clown, otherwise you would have been “dog shit, less than human.” Those were Old Man Mao’s own words of warning, to draw a line of demarcation between the people and the enemy. Faced with choosing between being dog shit and being a clown, you chose to be a clown. You loudly sang the army song, “Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention.” Like a soldier, you stood to attention before the portrait of the Commander-in-Chief that hung in the middle of the main wall of every office, and, holding high a red plastic-covered copy of Mao’s Sayings, you shouted “long live” three times. After the implementation of army control, all this was compulsory daily ritual at the start and finish of work. It was called “seeking instructions in the morning” and “reporting at night.”
At such times, you had to be careful not to laugh! Otherwise there would have been dire consequences, unless you were prepared to be a counterrevolutionary and hoped that at some future date you’d become a martyr. The former lieutenant colonel was absolutely correct, he was a clown, but he didn’t dare to laugh. It is only you of the present, who recalling those times, can laugh, although you find that you can’t.
He was the representative of a group of people’s organizations in a ferret-out team controlled by army personnel. When that group of masses and cadres chose him, he knew that his judgment day had come. However, the masses and cadres of the group that looked to him for support did not know that that single item in his file, his father’s having “hidden a gun,” could see him purged from that one big revolutionary family.
At the meeting of the ferret-out team, Officer Zhang read aloud an “internal control” list—that is, a list of persons on whom internal control was to be carried out. This was the first time he had heard the term, and it gave him a shock. The “internal control” was not directed only at ordinary workers, but included certain Party cadres. The ferreting-out was to start with “bad people” who had infiltrated people’s organizations. This was no longer the Red Guard violence of two years ago, or the armed fighting between factions of people’s organizations. It was now leisurely, and directed by army personnel, and, like a strategic plan of war, it was planned, coordinated, and fought in stages. The Army Control Commission had removed the seals from the personnel files, and in front of Officer Zhang were piles of materials on people with “problems.”
“All of you here are representatives of people’s organizations. Comrades, I hope all of you will rid yourselves of any capitalist-class factional feelings, and purge any bad elements who have infiltrated your organizations. We can have only one standpoint, and that is the standpoint of the proletariat. Factional standpoints are not allowed! We will discuss each of these cases, decide whom to put in the first list and whom to put in the second list. Of course, there is also a third list, and whether they are dealt with leniently or harshly depends on whether those persons take the initiative to admit their crimes, and on how they conduct themselves in confessions and disclosures!”
Officer Zhang had a wide face and a square jaw. His eyes swept over the representatives of the various people’s organizations as he jabbed a thick finger at the big pile of documents. Then, removing the cover on his cup, he began to drink his tea and to smoke.
He cautiously raised some questions, but only because Officer Zhang had said discussions were allowed. He asked what problems Liu, his former superior and department chief, had apart from a landlord family background? Also, there was a woman bureau chief who, back in those times, had been an underground Party member and organizer of student movements. According to the findings of his group, she had never been arrested, and there were no suspicions of her having been anti-Party or having capitulated to the enemy. Why had she also been listed for special investigation? Officer Zhang turned to him, raised the hand holding the cigarette, and gave him a look. That was when the former lieutenant colonel had rebuked him: “You clown!”
Several decades later, you were able to read a number of memoirs that gradually shed light on the internal struggles within the Chinese Communist Party. At the Political Bureau meetings, Mao Zedong probably gave his generals a look like this if they so much as offered the slightest dissent, then went on smoking and drinking his tea. Other generals would come forth to rebuke them. It was not necessary for the old man to say anything.
You, of course, were not a general. The former lieutenant colonel also yelled at him, “You insect!” Quite right, you were a very small insect. What was your ant’s life worth anyway?
After work, he went to get his bicycle from the shed downstairs and ran into Liang Qin, who worked in his office. When he had rebelled two years earlier, it was Liang Qin who had taken over his work. But his life as a rebel had ended. Seeing no one around, he said to Liang, “Go on ahead, but after the intersection slow down. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Liang went off on his bicycle and, afterwards, he caught up.
“Come to my home for a drink,” Liang said.
“Who else will be there?” he asked.
“My wife and son!”
“No, it wouldn’t be convenient. Let’s just cycle and talk like this.”
“What is it?” Liang had immediately sensed that something was wrong.
“Do you have any problems in your background?” He didn’t look at Liang and asked the question as if it was nothing of importance.
“No!” Liang
almost fell off his bicycle.
“Have you ever contacted anyone abroad?”
“I don’t have any relatives abroad!”
“Have you ever written letters to anyone abroad?”
“Wait! Let me think. . . .”
There was another red light, and they each put a foot on the ground and stopped their bicycles.
“Yes, I have. People at the workplace asked me about it, it was many years ago. . . .” Liang was on the verge of tears as he said this.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry! You’re out on the road. . . .” he said.
At that point, the green light came on, and the tide of bicycles started surging ahead.
“Tell me what else there is to this, I won’t implicate you!” Liang had pulled himself together.
“There is talk that you could be a spy, you will need to be careful.”
“Where did you hear this?”
He said he didn’t know.
“I did, in fact, write a letter to Hong Kong, to a neighbor of mine. We had grown up together, but, later on, one of his paternal aunts got him to go to Hong Kong. I did, in fact, write him a letter asking him to get me a dictionary of English idioms, that was all, and it was many lifetimes ago! It was during the war in Korea, when I had just graduated, I was in the army as an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp. . . .”
“Did you receive the dictionary?” he asked.
“No! You’re saying . . . the letter was never sent? Was it intercepted?” Liang went on to ask.
“Who knows?”
“I’m suspected . . . of having communicated with a foreign country?”
“It was you who said this.”
“And do you suspect me?” Liang turned to ask him.
“I’m not going into that with you. Just be careful!”
As a long, two-carriage, electric trolleybus passed close by, Liang swerved and almost collided with it.
“No wonder they transferred me out of the army. . . .” For Liang, everything had suddenly become clear.
“All this is not so important.”
