by Gao Xingjian
The old cadres had mostly been reinstated to their former positions. However, a small number, like the former Party secretary Wu Tao, were too old; arrangements were made for their retirement when they were exonerated, and remuneration, such as salary and housing and the allocation of work for their children, taken care of. However, a person like Old Tan, who was not a Party member but an insignificant deputy section-chief with a blemished background, remained at the cadre school doing hard manual labor until cadre schools were abolished and reverted to local governments as reform-through-labor farms for criminals. It was then that Old Tan returned to the capital. He was not old enough to retire, and had to wait around to be allocated some kind of work or other.
Lin had divorced and remarried. Her second husband was a newly appointed deputy department-head, whose former wife had died during the Cultural Revolution.
He began to publish his works, became a writer and left that old workplace. Lin had invited him to her home for a meal. Her second husband who was also there commented on literature, “The disaster that our Party has gone through really should be properly written up to educate later generations!”
Lin was in the living room with them, and there was a maid in the kitchen preparing the food. Lin was among the first to use imported perfumes; it was probably a French perfume, one of the latest by Chanel, or some such famous brand anyway.
He was in the process of getting a divorce. His wife, Qian, had written a letter to the Writers’ Association, accusing him of reactionary thinking, but had not been able to produce any evidence. He explained that she had become deranged during the Cultural Revolution and was mentally unstable, and she hated him because he had initiated divorce proceedings. Following the decade of the Cultural Revolution, people wanting a divorce were considerably fewer than those wanting to get married, but divorce was common practice. The law courts, which had just started to function again, couldn’t handle all the cases of miscarriage of justice, and didn’t want to create new problems, so he was finally able to extricate himself from the marriage. He apologized to Qian for having committed her youth to the grave. Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution alone could not be blamed. He himself was also to blame, although this could not compensate her for her lost youth. Fortunately, the anti-Party spy case against Qian’s father was suddenly dropped, and she was able to leave the village and return to be with her father.
He received a letter from Lu, which said, “All the good trees of the mountain have been cut down, and there is no place left for a decaying tree.” Lu had turned down an appointment to chair the new Discipline Investigation Committee of the local Party. He said he had retired, just like that. He wanted to build a house on the mountain to live out his old age.
A year later, he had the opportunity to travel south for work, and he made a special trip to see this benefactor who had once protected him. He first went to the county town where his old schoolmate Rong was still living in his thatched hut. In the interim, the roof had been rethatched, but it was again due for replacement. Rong now had another son. In the county town, family planning was not as rigorously enforced as in big cities, and the inspector for the family register was an acquaintance. In any case, Rong had already been living there for twenty years, and his wife was a local, so, after a slight delay, the child was given a residential permit. Rong was still working as a farm technician, and his wife was still selling merchandise in the cooperative shop at the entrance to the county town. She had tried to get a transfer to the department store in the little street behind their house; it was closer and would have been ideal for looking after the two small children at home. She had not given the cadre in charge enough gifts, and wasn’t successful. Rong was even more taciturn than before, and there were long periods of silence, when they just looked at one another.
The bus from the county town arrived at the little village, and, as always, people started to surge on board before everyone had got off. The bus left, but he didn’t go to the little street or the school. He was afraid of running into people he knew, then being dragged off for a meal or something. It would not do to visit one family and not another, and he thought that if he went from one place to another, it would take a couple of days. He stood at the bus stop and looked around for someone he knew, so that he could ask where Lu had built his house.
“Hey—” a young man from the timber cooperative with a cigarette hanging from his lips recognized him and came over to shake hands. During the concerted militia training, they had done shooting practice together, then got to know one another while drinking and bullshitting together. The man, no doubt now a minor cadre, did not intend to invite him home for a meal, but said he was due at the timber cooperative. He had only stayed here temporarily, and, having left the place, was of little interest to anyone; he was just an outsider.
However, he found out that Lu’s new house was on the other side of the river, on the mountain behind the flatland where the coal mine was located. After crossing the river, there were another three or four kilometers, and he would have to walk for some time. Rong had told him that the cadres in the county town were spreading the rumor that Lu had gone crazy. They said he had built a thatched hut on the mountain and had become a Daoist, living on a vegetarian diet, and, in a quest for longevity, was refining cinnabar to arrest the aging process. Lu’s old comrades, his superiors in higher echelons who had been reinstated to their former positions or promoted, were certain that his revolutionary will had deteriorated. Lu told him this after he went up the mountain and saw his old benefactor.
“I don’t want to get my hands dirty again. This is fine, a thatched hut with a purple bamboo garden where I grow vegetables and read books. I’m not like you, you’re still young. I’m getting old, and I am not going to do much more in life,” Lu said to him.
Lu, of course was not living in a thatched hut, but in an unimposing brick house with a tiled roof, which couldn’t be seen unless one climbed up the hill behind the coal mine.
Lu had taken a retirement payment for old cadres, designed the house himself, and supervised the local peasants who built it for him. The inside of the house was paved with blue-stone slabs. One of the slabs in the bedroom could be lifted: it was the entrance to a secret tunnel, which led into a small wooden hut by a stream adjoining a pine forest. It could be said that Lu had finally succeeded in preserving himself, yet, from time to time, probably because of what he had experienced in life, he still thought about possible plots against him.
In the main hall by a wall, inlaid into the floor, was an old stone tablet. Lu had some peasants carry it down from the ruins of the old temple on the top of the mountain. Much of the inscription was missing, but a rough outline of the life and thinking of the monk who had built the temple could be made out from what remained. A disgruntled graduate of the county level of the Imperial Civil Service Examinations had joined the rebellion of the Long Hairs, the Taipings. The Heavenly Kingdom of the Taipings had also aimed at establishing a utopia on earth, but internal fighting and cruel killings led to defeat. The scholar subsequently renounced the world, to live here as a monk. Books were piled in Lu’s bedroom. There were internal reference publications of the time for high-ranking cadres of the Party, such as the Japanese prime minister’s Autobiography of Tanaka Kakuei and the three-volume Memoirs of General de Gaulle, as well as an undated, hand-sewn edition of The Essentials of Pharmacology and a new edition of classical poetry.
“I want to write something, I’ve already got the title: Daily Chronicle of a Man in the Mountains. What do you think of it? It’s just that I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to write it,” Lu said.
He and Lu laughed. This tacit understanding was the basis of his friendship with Lu, and, probably, the reason he had received Lu’s protection during those years.
“Let’s get something to eat with the liquor!”
Lu wasn’t a vegetarian at all, and took him to the coal miners’ dining room. Below the hill, at the mouth of the coa
l mine where there were rows of workers’ huts, was the structure for the electric trolley carts. It was late afternoon, work had stopped for the day, and the mine workers were queuing with their big bowls at the food window of the big bamboo-shed dining room. Lu had gone straight to the kitchen. Suddenly, a woman’s voice called out, “Teacher!”
A young woman had left the queue of grimy coal miners, and was cheerfully coming over to greet him. He immediately made out that it was his student Sun Huirong, wearing a peasant woman’s gown. Her beautiful eyes had not changed, but her face and body had become rounder.
“How is it that you’re here?”
He could not suppress his surprise and delight, and was about to go up to her when Lu emerged from the kitchen, gave him a shove, and commanded, “Get going!”
He instinctively obeyed. He had been under Lu’s protection a long time, and it had become habit. But he couldn’t help turning to look back. Anxiety, panic, despair, shame, all showed in her eyes that had sunk deeper and become darker. Her lips parted, wanting to speak but uttered no sounds. She was still standing apart from the men in the queue with their bowls, and everyone was looking at her.
“Ignore her, the slut sleeps with anyone, and she’s got men fighting with knives in this mine!”
Lu was speaking to him in a low voice. He was upset, but, forcing himself to follow, he heard Lu say, “At the beginning of the month, when wages are paid and those devils have a bit of money, they go off to her house. The women in the village are all cursing and yelling about it. At present, she’s working at the broadcasting station of the mine, but you can’t go anywhere near her. If you say more than a few words to her, she will want you to go to bed with her, and everyone will assume that you couldn’t get away and did go to bed with her!”
Half an hour later, Lu had taken out bowls and chopsticks, and poured liquor. The cook from the dining room arrived and brought out plates of quick-fried dishes, still hot, from a covered basket. He was not in the mood for drinking, and deeply regretted not having stopped to talk to Sun Huirong. But then, what would he have said to her?
You and she seemed to be from two different worlds. Although your world could never be clean, she was stuck in this coal pit, and would never be able to pull herself out. She had forgotten the distance separating you from her, forgotten her experiences, and forgotten her status as a whore in the eyes of the locals. To her, you were her teacher, she was not asking for your help, and probably she had never again thought of changing her circumstances. It was a sudden and total innocence that had resurfaced, a hazy childhood infatuation, and she was so happy that she forgot herself. As you came to this realization, you flinched from the pain of having hurt her like this, and for a long time you couldn’t forgive yourself for being so weak.
At night, lying in Lu’s bedroom with the secret tunnel, he listened to the sound of water flowing outside the window and the waves of wind blowing through the pine forest. Early the next day, he crossed the river and hurried to the village to get the early bus back to the county town.
You had a photograph of Sun Huirong. You had taken it at a performance of the revolutionary opera, A Qing Sao, by the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team on National Day. It was before she had been assigned to the production brigade, when you had helped her with her makeup and lipstick. She sang the role of the heroine, A Qing Sao, who fought the bandit army of the Japanese puppet government. This opera had been prescribed in the syllabus issued by the County Education Bureau, and all the students had to learn to sing the songs from it in the music class. She had the best voice. It was impossible to know if she now had a man or was still a whore in the coal mine, which was run as a peasant collective enterprise. After you left China, the authorities sealed off your apartment in Beijing, and those photographs, together with your books and handwritten manuscripts, were all confiscated.
While you were still in China, a former student, who had gone on to graduate from university, was sent on a job to Beijing and paid you a visit. When you asked him about Secretary Lu, he said that he had died. You asked how he had died.
“Sickness, I suppose,” he said. But he had only heard this.
You had never met Lu’s wife. It was said that she taught at the regional teachers’ college, but that she was often on sick leave because of psychological problems. She stayed with her daughter, but that could have been a means of self-preservation, to avoid being implicated. Also, a woman might not necessarily have been able to endure the life of a recluse in the mountains.
Afterward, you had a dream. The village did not have houses that were close to one another or huddled around a small street and a few lanes. It was desolate, and the houses were scattered and far apart. The school was on a hill, and it was empty. The windows and doors were all wide open. You went to look for Lu; his home looked like a village dwelling, but stood all alone, with no other houses around. There was an iron padlock on the door. It was in the afternoon, and the setting sun was shining on the orange earthen walls. You were not sure what to do, but seemed to have come to him to work out a way of getting you out of this place. You didn’t want to spend your whole life, grow old, and die in this empty school. They had told you to guard the school, grade endless homework books. You had no time to look up to think about your own affairs, although you were not sure what, in fact, you wanted to think about. As you stood before the mud wall looking at the padlock hanging on the door, you heard behind you the sound of the wind rising from the paddy fields. It was late autumn, after the harvest, and only grain stubble remained. . . .
53
The first time he ever saw the great man at such close range was in Tiananmen Square, midway between the Imperial Palace and Qianmen, behind the Memorial of the Heroes of the People. The recently completed mausoleum, constructed with heavy-duty steel-reinforced concrete, was said to be capable of withstanding nuclear bombs and point-nine earthquakes. In the crystal casket, Mao’s head was really big, it was clearly swollen, and this could be seen in spite of the heavy makeup. He was five meters away, and filing past in the queue only allowed two or three seconds. There was no time to articulate what was on his mind.
He felt that he had things to say to the old man. Of course, not to the corpse of the Leader of the people in the crystal casket, but to Mao wearing only a bathrobe. Whether he had just got out of bed with some woman friend, or had just got out of the swimming pool, was not important; moreover, that such a great leader had numerous women friends shouldn’t be held against him. He simply wanted to speak to the old man after he had taken off his Commander-in-Chief army uniform and his Great Leader’s mask. You really lived fully as a human being, and it must be admitted that you possessed individuality, that you really were a Superman. You succeeded in dominating China, and your ghost still hovered over more than one billion Chinese. Your influence was so powerful that it spread to all parts of the world, and it was pointless to deny this. What he wanted to say was, you could kill people at will. What he wanted to tell Mao was, you made every single person speak your words.
He also wanted to say that history would fade into oblivion, but, back in those days, he had been forced to say what Mao had dictated, therefore, it was impossible for him to eradicate his hatred for Mao. Afterward, he had said to himself that as long as Mao was revered as leader, emperor, god, he would not return to that country. However, what gradually became clear to him was that it was impossible for a person’s inner mind to be subjugated by another, unless that person allowed it.
What he finally wanted to say was that although it was possible to kill a person, no matter how frail the person was, that person’s human dignity could not be killed. A person is human because this bit of self-respect is indestructible. When a person’s life is like an insect’s, is the person aware that an insect also possesses its own insect dignity? Before an insect is trampled or squashed to death, it will pretend to be dead, struggle, or try to run away in order to save itself, but its insect dignity can’t be trampled to d
eath. People have been killed off like the grass under the blade, but does the grass under the blade seek to be forgiven? People are clearly inferior to grass. What he wanted to prove was that, as well as life, people have human dignity. If preserving one’s human dignity is impossible, and one isn’t killed and doesn’t commit suicide, then, if one does not want to die the only option is to flee. Dignity is an awareness of existence, and it is in this that the power of the frail individual lies. Once one’s awareness of existence is extinguished, the apparition of existence, too, is extinguished.
Enough of all this, all this nonsense. But he had sustained himself precisely through this nonsense. Now, when he could finally speak these words openly to Mao, the old man had already been dead for some years, so he could only address them to Mao’s spirit or shadow.
Mao was wearing a bathrobe, he had probably just come out of the swimming pool. He was tall and had a fat belly. His high-pitched voice was somewhat like a woman’s, and he had a thick Hunan accent. His kindly benign face was just as it was in the unchanging oil portrait on the wall in Tiananmen Square. To look at, he was an amiable person. He liked smoking, was a chain smoker, and his teeth were stained black from tobacco. He smoked specially manufactured Panda-brand cigarettes with a pungent aroma. Mao also liked richly flavored foods, for example, fatty pork with chili, a point that had not been fabricated in the memoirs of his doctor.
