by Gao Xingjian
37
A young woman is lying on top of you. You’re in bed, not fully awake. She’s giggling and the two of you are messing around. You’re really enjoying yourself and hope you are not dreaming. You’re squashed under her, and, down her open collar, you touch her smooth skin, feel her firm breasts. She doesn’t resist, and goes on having fun with you. You’re delighted by this unexpected encounter, but can’t say her name. You vaguely know it, but are afraid of getting it wrong. You sift through your memories. In such-and-such a situation, there was this girl, you often saw her on your travels but were never able to get close to her. She is now pressing against you and you say you didn’t think you would meet her like this. You’re really so very happy! She says that she is here just to see you. On her way through the city, she heard that you were here for a conference, so she came to see you. You say don’t leave! She says of course not, but she does have to fix up her luggage and go through registration procedures. You don’t immediately make love with her, thinking to yourself there will be plenty of time, she has come from far away specially to see you, so it’s not likely that she will leave right away. You get out of bed and ask where her luggage is. She says over there, in the adjoining room. You turn and see that the two rooms indeed adjoin, in fact there is nothing separating them, and, moreover, the other room has two beds in it. You’re worried someone else will take the room, so you say you will have to quickly get a hotel attendant to get you a double room. But it happens to be the lunch break, so you go to the dining room together to have something to eat. She follows closely, snuggles against you, and says it was very hard, finding you. You keep trying to remember her name, steal glances at her familiar face, but you can’t be sure. She’s more like a woman than a young girl, an older teenager or a young woman, so there shouldn’t be any problem making love with her. Moreover, she has come to see you. She says shouldn’t you first introduce her to the person in charge of the conference? You say you are now a free man and can stay with anyone you want to. You don’t have to get anyone’s approval, and you take her with you to the service desk of the hotel to change to a double room. The man behind the desk hands you a key and a slip of paper. There’s a number on the key tag, and you ask where the room is. The man says he is only in charge of registration, and, to find that out, you would have to phone up, the phone number is on the slip of paper. You ask if you can use the phone on his desk, and he says you will need coins. You can’t find any coins in your pocket, and talk to the man again. Is it all right to call first and pay later? He doesn’t say either yes or no, so you make a call and are told that the room is on the third floor. You get in the elevator, and it takes you to the top floor, and you come out onto a parking lot. The two of you get back into the elevator, go down, but still can’t find the room. You stop a maid with a trolley, who is cleaning rooms, and she tells you to go down one floor. The two of you finally arrive on the ground floor and find an elegant dining room, so you think you may as well eat first. The maître d’ in a tie politely apologizes and says reservations are needed, and that they are fully booked. You tell him you are taking part in the conference, and he says special arrangements have been made for conference participants in another dining room. You and she get into the elevator again, to look for the room. You scrutinize the number on the key and find something odd about it. The number is 11 GY, and you’ve found rooms with numbers 14, 15, and 16, but there isn’t a number 11. You ask the fat woman sitting on a high stool at the bar by the passageway, thinking she is a hotel guest and will know about the number. The swivel stool spins around as the woman points behind you, saying, right there, it’s that hole! You don’t understand why it’s a hole. Written on the brass plate on the doorframe is number 11 G, the second letter isn’t clear but it could be Y. You part the glass-bead curtain, and inside is a huge row of joined mattresses. You look around the big room. Above, to the right of the joined mattresses, there is yet another layer of bedding, which stretches inside the wall. Access is only by crawling in, but the four double mattresses all have pillows. You think that if you want to make love with her, you will put her luggage in the farthest corner. You come out of the room and think to yourself that somehow you will have to find another room. However, she says she is traveling with another woman and they have to stay together. Luckily, they know people in the city and will be able to find somewhere to stay. But, you say, as she has come to see you . . . She says next time, there will be opportunities. She turns to leave, and you wake up, full of regret. You try to recall the memory, to clutch at some clues, so that you will know how you came to have this dream. You discover you are in a single bed in a small room, and there is a bird chirping outside the window.
For a while, you can’t remember how you came to be sleeping here, your head is throbbing, and you aren’t fully awake. Last night, you drank too much. You haven’t drunk to excess like this for a long time. You drank scotch, five-grain liquor, and red wine, then, to quench your thirst, also beer. A full case of beer had been opened, but some cans are still left. Someone brought the scotch from England, and the five-grain liquor was from China. You remember now: a group of Chinese writers and poets have come for a conference here, in the southern outskirts of Stockholm, at the international center named after the assassinated Swedish president Olaf Palme.
You open your eyes and sit up. Outside the window is the lake with clouds hanging low over it. Lush shrubs and trees grow on the flat stretches of parkland, and there is only the singing of birds, no one is around, and it’s very peaceful.
You recall the fragrant warmth of the woman in the dream and can’t help feeling disappointed. Why did you have such a dream? It must have been because last night everyone was talking about China again, and you had a lot to drink. China always gives you a headache. But that is the purpose of the conference, to discuss contemporary Chinese literature. The Swedes had sponsored the visit of a group of Chinese writers from China and elsewhere, providing the plane tickets, and food and accommodation for a few days. This was an ideal place for a vacation. There was plenty of beer, but because liquor was heavily taxed, the conference participants brought it along with them. There was heavy drinking until dawn. In July, it was summer, and it was a white night; the sky did not become dark, and at midnight it was like dawn. The other side of the lake was a continuous hazy forest with a streak of bright-red dawn above, the birds and insects were sleeping, but these old friends went on talking loudly on the wooden jetty next to the lakeside sauna hut. They engaged in lofty discussions, and their voices resonated into the distance. Ripples stirred on the mirror-smooth surface, spreading in circles to the middle of the lake and making the weeds and the reflections tremble. And this was not a dream.
One of the friends insisted on talking about a whole lot of bizarre happenings in China that had nothing to do with literature. He said that this person who fed the animals in a zoo went to work early one morning, before they started selling tickets. He had just gone in through the side gate for zoo personnel, when he heard the roaring of the tiger he normally fed. He wondered why it was roaring if it wasn’t feeding time, and went to take a look. The tiger was lying in the cage in a pool of blood, with its front paws missing. A rescue attempt was made, the wounds bandaged, but the tiger had lost too much blood, and there was no tiger blood for a transfusion, so they couldn’t save it.
“Why had the tiger’s paws been chopped off?” someone asked.
“Surely everyone here has heard stories about Chinese people eating bear paws?”
“But I’ve never heard about tiger paws being eaten.”
“It’s for making tiger-bone liquor, which has been a cure for rheumatism from ancient times! Where else could you hunt for a tiger these days, except at a zoo?”
Everyone broke out laughing and said, “You scoundrel, you’re anti-Chinese right through. You’ve made it all up, haven’t you?”
This friend, however, was quite serious and said he had read it in an official Mainland newspap
er. “A friend sent me a newspaper clipping from China, it was just a two-line item. In Sweden, it would have made front-page headlines! And, for sure, the environmentalists would have marched in the streets. Hey, does Sweden have a Green Party?”
You didn’t go to the dining room for breakfast. From your window, you watched the limousines downstairs drive off to take the others sightseeing in Stockholm.
Afterward, you went for a walk along the gravel path around the lake. On the surrounding fields, here and there, stood big, white, plastic bags that probably contained grass fodder. At the edge of the dark-green forest, these white bags looked surreal, and you again seemed to be entering a dream.
As you follow a track into the forest, the light around the lake vanishes, and, deeper into the forest, the trees seem to get taller, the tallest and straightest being the Korean pines. Suddenly, you hear the shouting of children, and you can’t help feeling emotional. It’s as if you have returned to your childhood, even though you know those times no longer exist. You stop to listen, to prove you’re not hearing things, then hurry on. The track turns, and right ahead, between the trees, is a clearing where two girls are dragging sacks of, most likely, pine cones. The taller of the two is wearing jean shorts, cut off so the frayed edges come above the knee. Farther off, a boy is running about with a butterfly net. The two girls stop from time to time, and, as you don’t want to disturb them, you slow down. The boy is in front, running and shouting. The girls call out to him, but he takes no notice and keeps running, so the girls follow, dragging their sacks. The sound of the children gradually fades into the distance, and, by the time you can no longer see them, the dirt track has started to disappear into the grass, and the place looks quite desolate. You still seem to faintly hear the shouting of the children, and you stop to listen, but it is only the rustle of the waves of pines as the wind passes through the tops of the trees.
You keep trying to recall that dream, to recall the tactile sensation of fondling her smooth firm breasts and to recall that indistinct but familiar face. Instead, you recall another dream you have had. The odd thing is that you have had this dream so many times that it has turned into a memory, so it seems that there really was such a girl. After school, she and her girl classmates were a happy lot and were always together. You seem to have been in the same class, but it was not easy to get on friendly terms with her. Those girls also made friends with boys, in fact, they only made friends with boys, but you could never get into their circle. You then remember a big courtyard complex where you once lived. Your home was in a back courtyard, and it was hard getting there through the front courtyard where a lot of people were living. The girl, it seems, lived in the front courtyard. Just like that, another dream is summoned up. The girl lived in a little dead-end street, an old courtyard complex that was very deep, with one entrance after another. Her family lived in the first courtyard, in the left wing after entering the gate, and a classmate of yours from middle school also lived in that courtyard. You went to see this classmate to see if the girl’s family still lived there, but, when you got there, you didn’t see your classmate. This summons up other dreams that are more like vague memories, and it’s hard differentiating the dreams from the memories. You recall that when you were four or five years old, during the chaos of war, you and your parents were refugees and had lived in such a big courtyard complex. But you are searching for a big girl with full breasts, and your memories and dreams are all confused.
Your childhood years are dim and hazy, and only some points of light appear before your eyes. How is it possible to retrieve past happenings that have become submerged in what has been forgotten? It’s hard to confirm what gradually appears, and it’s hard to decide in the end whether it is memory or something you have imagined. Moreover, are memories accurate? They are fragmented and jump backward and forward, and, when you try to track them, the flashing points of light become dim and turn into words, but you can only link up a few of them. Can memories be retold? You doubt it, and you also doubt the capacity of language to do this. One retells memories or dreams, because some wonderful things that give you warmth, fragrance, longing, and impulses flash up. But can this be said of words?
You remember clearly that there was such a girl, and that you sat at the same desk, on the same wooden bench, and that she had a fair complexion. He once broke his pencil during a test, and when the girl noticed, she pushed the pencil box full of sharpened pencils she had on the desk to him. From then on, he began to take an interest in the girl, and would look out for her on his way to and from school. He once picked up a perfumed card that had dropped out of her textbook, and, after school, the girl gave it to him. When the boys from the class saw this, they started chanting, “The two of them are in love! The two of them are in love!” It made him blush, and, probably because of that, thereafter, warmth, fragrance, and femininity all came to be associated for him.
You also remember a dream from your teenage years. It was in a garden with long uncut grass, and among the clumps of grass lay the pure, white, naked body of a woman, a cold statue of carved marble. This was a dream he had after reading Mérimée’s novel The Venus of Ille. He slept close to the statue, and how he had sex with it was unclear, but there was a cold puddle around his thighs. It was a winter’s night, and he woke up terrified.
You think about Bergman’s old black-and-white film Wild Strawberries, which captures in detail an old man’s anxiety about death; probably you’ve gradually moved into the phase of old age. In another of his films, Cries and Whispers, you feel sympathy for the three sisters and their buxom maid, who are all tortured by loneliness, sexual desire, illness, and fear of death. Can literature and art communicate? It is, in fact, pointless discussing this, but there are people who do believe that this is impossible. And can Chinese literature communicate? Communicate with whom, the West? Or communicate with the Chinese on the Mainland, or with the Chinese living abroad? And what is Chinese literature? Does literature have national boundaries? And do Chinese writers belong to a specific location? Do people living on the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese-Americans all count as Chinese people? This, again, brings in politics, so let’s talk just about pure literature. But does pure literature really exist? Then let’s talk about literature. But what is literature? These issues are all of relevance to the conference and are all endlessly contested.
You’re tired of the debate over literature and politics. China is already so remote from you; moreover, you were expelled from the country long ago, and you do not need to bear that country’s label. You simply write in the Chinese language, and that’s all.
38
Buses were parked in front of the building from which five persons had jumped to their deaths less than a month ago. The first batch of about a hundred people to go to the countryside had assembled for final instructions from the army officer. As ordered by Officer Zhang, pinned on each person’s chest was a red paper flower hurriedly made by office personnel before the buses were to be boarded.
This detachment of fighters was mostly elderly. There were also women, people of retirement age who hadn’t been permitted to retire, as well as people on sick leave with high blood pressure. Among their numbers were old cadres from the Yan’an base area and old guerrilla fighters who had fought local battles on the plains of central Hebei province. In accordance with Mao’s newly promulgated May Seventh Directive, these people were all off to cultivate the land, and wearing this paper flower on the chest signified that reform through labor was glorious.
Officer Zhang came out of the building, touched the brim of his cap with his fingers in a salute, then stood at attention before everyone, “Comrades, from now on you are glorious May Seventh fighters! You are the advance detachment and have the important mission of establishing the Communist university called for by our Great Leader, Chairman Mao. I wish all of you a rich harvest in both your labor and thinking!”
He was regular army personnel and didn’t waste time talking. Ha
ving said this, he raised his arm and signaled for the buses to be boarded. In front of the building were family members, as well as colleagues who had come to see them off. People were waving from all the windows of every floor of the building. There had been enough fighting between factions, and those leaving all counted as comrades. It was an emotional situation, some of the women were wiping tears from their eyes, but on the whole, there was a cheery atmosphere.
He was secretly pleased. He had organized his belongings, even scrubbed the enamel chamber pot in his room, and packed everything into the wooden boxes they had provided him. People sent to the country were provided with two boxes at no cost, but additional ones were charged. All this came from documents issued by the May Seventh Office, which the State Council had newly established. He nailed up his boxes of books. Just when he would be able to open the books again, he didn’t know, but they would accompany him in life, they were his last bit of mental sustenance.
When he delivered his application to be sent to the country, Officer Zhang was hesitant and said, “The ferret-out work hasn’t been completed, then there will be many difficult tasks—”
Without waiting for the officer to finish talking, he started a barrage of prattle, explaining in a single breath his resolve and his need to undertake labor and reform. He added, “Officer Zhang, I want to report that my girlfriend was allocated work in the country after graduating from university. When the cadre school is fully established, I can get my girlfriend to come, then I will be able to carry out a lifetime of revolution in the countryside!”
He had made it clear that he was not hiding anything and that he had given thought to practical matters. Officer Zhang rolled his eyes. His fate had been decided.
“All right!” Officer Zhang took his application.
