One Man

by Gao Xingjian

  He did not immediately understand. At dusk one day, in early summer, June, when the Cultural Revolution had just started, he went to the old man's home to ask for news about what was happening. As soon as he came in, the old man quickly closed the door and, staring at him, asked in a hushed voice, "Did anyone see you come in?"

  "There's no one in the courtyard," he said.

  The old man was not like the old cadres; nevertheless, when he instructed young people, he was forever saying our Party this and our Nation that. He was, after all, a famous person with revolutionary credentials. He spoke with a vigorous voice, and what he said was always measured and lucid. But now his voice had suddenly turned reedy, and trembled deep down in his throat as he said, "I'm a black-gang element, don't come here again. You're young, don't get involved. You've never been through the experience of struggles within the Party-"

  The old man wouldn't let him finish his greetings, and, nervously opening the door a crack, peeped out and said, "Keep it for later, wait until all this passes, keep it for later, you don't know about the Yan'an Rectification Movement."

  "What was the Yan'an Rectification Movement like?" he went on to stupidly ask.

  "I'll tell you later, leave quickly, leave quickly!"

  All this took place in less than a minute. One minute earlier he thought the struggles within the Party were somewhere far away, it had not crossed his mind that they were right in front of him.

  Ten years later, he heard that the old man had been released from prison. By then, he too had returned from the countryside and was back in Beijing, so he went to see him. The old man was reduced to skin and bones, and one of his legs had been broken; he was propped up in a reclining chair and had a black Persian cat on his lap. A walking stick stood by the armrest.

  "A cat's life is actually better than a human's."

  The old man's lips parted in what seemed to be a smile, revealing the few front teeth he had left. As he stroked the old cat, his beady eyes in their sunken sockets glinted strangely, just like a cat's. The old man did not talk to him about his experiences in prison. It was not until he visited him in hospital, shortly before his death, that he said his greatest regret in life was that he had joined the Party.

  Back then, when he left the old man's house, he thought about those manuscripts of his. They had nothing to do with the Party, but they could get him into trouble. Still, he hadn't decided to burn them, so he carried them on his back in a big bag to the home of Big Lu, a friend he'd made while in hospital with dysentery. Big Lu, born and bred in Beijing, had a big build and taught geography in a middle school. Trying to impress a pretty young woman, Big Lu got him to draft a series of love letters. Then, by the time Big Lu's newly wedded wife found out he'd been an accessory in the letter writing, she was already irreversibly married to Big Lu, so there was a special friendship between the three of them. Big Lu lived with his parents, and they had an apartment with a courtyard all to themselves, so it wasn't hard to hide a bag of things.

  At the height of summer, August, the Red Guard movement started. Big Lu's wife suddenly phoned him at the office and arranged to meet him at noon in a shop that sold milk drinks and Western-style cakes. He thought the couple must have had an argument, so he hurried on his bicycle to the cake shop. The old shop sign had been taken down and replaced with a new one, with the slogan: SERVING THE WORKERS, PEASANTS, AND SOLDIERS. Inside the shop, above the seats, was a long slogan scrawled in black characters across the wall: OUT WITH ALL STINKING CAPITALIST OFFSPRING!

  At first, the "destruction of the four olds" by the Red Guards, which had started in the middle schools, seemed to be children having a ruckus. However, the Great Leader's public letter addressed to them, affirming that "it is right to rebel," incited the young teenagers to violent action. Anyway, not being a stinking capitalist offspring, he went in. They were selling milk drinks, as usual, but before he had found somewhere to sit, Big Lu's wife came in, took his arm as if she were his girlfriend, and said, "I'm not hungry yet, let's go for a walk, there's something I have to buy."

  When they had left the cake shop and were on the street, she quietly told him that Big Lu had been so intimidated by the Red Guards at the school that he had shaved his own head in advance. This was because his family owned their apartment. They did not count as capitalists, but even as petty entrepreneurs, they could be searched at any time by the Red Guards. She asked him to quickly take away that bag of his from the coal shed in the courtyard.

  It was Lin who saved him. Early in the morning, soon after getting into work, Lin walked by several times in the corridor. His desk faced the corridor and he saw that Lin was signaling him. He came out of the office and followed Lin down to the end of the corridor, where there was a bend before the stairwell. As no one was coming, they stopped there. Lin quickly told him to hurry home to fix up his things, because the Red Guards from the workplace were about to set out to search the belongings of his roommate, Old Tan. He rushed down the stairs, cycled hard, and got back to his room in a lather of sweat. He piled all his own things onto his own bed and beside it. He also went through the drawers of Old Tan's desk. He found an old, pre-Liberation photograph of Old Tan, taken at university with a group of students. Everyone was in student uniform, wearing caps with the twelve-point white-sun insignia of the Nationalist Party. He rolled it into a little ball, went out of the courtyard, and tossed it into the deep pit of the public lavatory on the street. When he got back to the courtyard, the car from the workplace had already arrived.

  Four Red Guards from the workplace entered the room, and Lin was among them. Lin knew he was a writer but had never seen any of his manuscripts. She was in love with him, and didn't care about his writings. She, of course, had not come because of his manuscripts, but because he had taken lots of photographs of her, not naked but in provocative poses. They had been taken before and after the two of them had illicit sex in the woods at Badaling, in the western suburbs of Beijing. If any of those were found, it would be seen at a glance that their relationship had gone past being colleagues or revolutionary comrades. Lin was a deputy-minister's daughter, and she was married. Her husband, from an old revolutionary family, was in the army, and worked in a research unit carrying out research on nothing less than rockets or some new weapons.

  He had not the slightest interest in defense secrets, but was infatuated with this beautiful woman. Lin had taken the initiative, and she was the more passionate.

  Lin was deliberately casual and made a loud fuss, "This room of yours is really small! There's nowhere to sit."

  She had been here before, of course, when Old Tan wasn't home, and she'd be wearing a low-cut dress-he'd pull down the zipper on the back, take out her breasts and kiss them-nothing like the army outfit she wore now. Her long hair that used to be in a plait had been cut and tied with rubber bands into two short bunches, the standard hairstyle for women soldiers in the forces, as well as for the Red Guards of the present.

  "How about making some tea, I'm dying of thirst!"

  Lin deliberately opened the door wide and, standing in the doorway, she fanned herself with her handkerchief. Because of her doing this, the neighbors in the courtyard, peering into the back window, would not get the wrong impression that he was being searched. She made it all seem cheerful, as if they had dropped in for a visit.

  He quickly made tea for everyone. The others declined, but the seriousness of the search had evaporated; besides, they all knew one another. Before the wearing of red armbands, family backgrounds were indistinguishable and everyone appeared to be equal. The leader of the Red Guards, Danian, was a hefty youth who played table tennis with him at lunchtime, and the two got on well. Daman's father was political commissar of an army division. He was wearing his father's old, much-washed, faded khaki army cap, and also an old leather army belt that was no longer regulation gear. These gave him the air of being a blood-lineage successor to the revolution.

  When the Red Guards first formed at the workplace,
he and other youths without a Five Red Categories background accepted the invitation to attend a meeting. It was there that Danian first revealed what he was capable of. Seated at one end of the bench of the main table, he said to those who didn't qualify to be Red Guards, "You People attending our Red Guard meeting today count in our revolutionary ranks as fellow travelers!" Danian confronted him by calling out his name-"Of course, that includes you!"-to let him know that it referred to him as well. However, having read The History of the USSR, he knew precisely what "fellow traveler" signified. If Lin had not warned him, and those manuscripts of his were found, he would certainly have been destroyed by this fellow in this surprise attack.

  Danian retained his air of formality and said, "We're here to search for reactionary criminal evidence on Tan Xinren, and this has nothing to do with you. Which are your belongings? Separate them from his."

  He put on a smile and said, "I've already separated my things, is there something else I can do to help?"

  They all said, "This is none of your business, this is none of your business. Which is his desk?"

  "That's his, the drawers aren't locked."

  He pointed it out, then stood to one side. This was all he could say in defense of his roommate, Tan. But at the same time, he had drawn a line of demarcation between Tan and himself. Only later did he find out that, just as he was going downstairs to get his bicycle to hurry home, a Red Guard notice had been posted in the front hall of the workplace building: "Seize Tan Xinren with his history as a counterrevolutionary!" Old Tan, immediately isolated in the workplace building, had lost his freedom.

  They pulled out Old Tan's notebooks, translation manuscripts, letters, photographs, and English-language books. Tan translated some novels from English in his spare time, mostly prorevolutionary works by writers from Asia and Africa. However, there was an English novel with a half-naked foreign woman on the cover, and this was put to one side. From under the old-newspaper lining of a drawer, they pulled out a white envelope. It was found to contain several condoms.

  "The old bastard is still at this sort of thing!"

  Danian took one and waved it about. Everyone laughed.

  It wasn't that the people involved were amused, but that everyone was putting on an act of being pure and chaste. He and Lin also laughed but avoided one another's eyes.

  Later, at the mass meeting called to criticize him, they questioned Old Tan about the woman he had an "improper sexual relationship" with. It was intimated that Old Tan was involved in a spy network, and he was forced to name the woman, a widow. Immediately, the Red Guards at the woman's work unit were notified, and her home, too, was searched. Some heartrending classical poems in Tan's drawer, probably written for this woman, constituted irrefutable evidence of "anti-Party, anti-Socialist longings for the paradise of the past."

  The Red Guards found two loose bricks in the house and pried them up.

  "Should I go and borrow a spade from a neighbor?"

  He had deliberately asked Danian this to avoid the pain of being subjected to a search. At the same time, he wanted to play a joke: they might as well dig three feet down and make an archaeological discovery. Terror only came afterward. He borrowed a pickax from the old retired worker next door, and they began digging, filled the room with dirt and bits of brick so that there was nowhere to step, then threw down the pickax and left.

  It was afterward that he found out the surveillance unit at his workplace had been informed by the street committee that the sound of a wireless transmitter was coming from their room. The person who had reported it must have been the old retired worker next door. When Old Tan and he had gone off to work, the old man, who was at home, heard the crackle of the radio they had forgotten to turn off behind the locked door. He took it to be a secret transmitter and must have thought that if he could catch the enemy it would Prove his total loyalty to the Leader and the Party. When he ran into the old codger in the courtyard after the search, the man's wrinkled old face was beaming with smiles. Disaster had thus brushed by him.

  10

  The lights are off, and you're lying in the dark on a bed with a woman, your bodies close to one another, and you are telling her about the Cultural Revolution. Nothing could be more futile, and only a Jewish woman with a German mind, who has learned Chinese, could possibly be interested.

  "Shall I keep going?" you ask.

  "I'm listening," she says.

  You say there was a middle-aged woman who worked as an editor in your office. A political cadre summoned her and said there was a telephone call for her in the security office. She returned some minutes later to the office, tidied the proofs on her desk, and, looking at the expressionless faces in the office, announced that her husband had gassed himself and that she was going home to attend to things.

  The head of the office was in solitary confinement, and Old Liu, the department chief, had been labeled an alien-class element who had wormed his way into the Party, so she could only request leave from those left in the office. Early the following day, she wrote a poster, clearly drawing a line of demarcation between herself and her husband who had "cut himself off from both the people and the Party."

  "Don't go on, it's heartbreaking," she whispers into your ear.

  You say you have no desire to go on.

  "Why was this happening?" she asks.

  "Enemies had to be found; without enemies, how could the political authorities sustain their dictatorship?"

  "But that's how it was with the Nazis!" She is excited. "You should write about all this!"

  You say you are not a historian, you're lucky enough to have escaped, and there's no need for you to make another sacrifice to history.

  "Then write about your own experiences, your personal experiences. You should write all this up, this is valuable!"

  "Historically valuable? When the many thousands of tons of archives become public, it will just be a wad of scrap paper."

  "But Solzhenytsin-"

  You cut her short and say you're not a fighter and you're not a flag-bearer.

  "But don't you think that some day things will change?" She needs to have faith.

  You say you are not a fortune-teller, and you don't live in empty hope, and you will not be lining up in the streets to welcome it. You will not be returning to China during your lifetime, and there is no need for you to waste the little life you have left.

  She softly apologizes for stirring up these memories, and says that to understand your suffering is to understand you, can't you see?

  You say you got out of hell and don't want to go back.

  "But you need to talk about it, and, while you are, maybe you will become less uptight about it." Her voice is gentle, she wants to comfort you.

  You ask if she has ever played with sparrows, or watched children at it. A string is tied to one of the sparrow's legs while the child holds the other end of the string. The sparrow flaps its wings desperately but can't fly, and is tormented until it just closes its eyes and stops moving, strangled by the string. You say that, as a child, you used to catch praying mantises. That jade-green body with its long, thin legs and two pincers raised like meat cleavers looks ferocious, but when children tie a fine thread to one of its legs, it tosses and turns a few times, and then falls to pieces. You ask if she's had such experiences.

  "People aren't sparrows!" she protests.

  "And, of course, they're not praying mantises either," you say.

  "Nor are they heroes, and if they can't stand up to might and power, they can only flee."

  The room floods with darkness so thick that it seems to be in motion.

  "Press close to me." Her voice is suffused with gentleness. She's brought you pain and she's trying to comfort you.

  Separated by her negligee, you embrace her soft body but can't generate lust. She caresses you, and her soft hands wander over your body, bestowing her feminine kindness upon you. You say you're mentally worked up and tense, and you close your eyes to loosen up and t
o feel her tenderness.

  "Then talk about women," she softly teases by your ear like a solicitous lover. "Talk about her."

  "Who?"

  "That woman of yours, was her name Lin?"

  You say she wasn't your woman, she was someone else's wife.

  "Anyway, she was your lover. Did you have lots of women?"

  "You should realize that in China, at that time, it was not possible to have lots of women."

  You also add that Lin was your first woman. You say this, knowing that probably she will not believe you.

  "Did you love her?" she asks.

  You say that it was she who seduced you and that you didn't want to become involved in this sort of futile love.

  "Do you still think about her?" she asks.

  "Margarethe, why are you asking this?"

  "I want to find out the status of women in your heart."

  You say she was, of course, quite lovely. She was a recent university graduate, she was very pretty, and could even be called sexy. At that time, in China, not many dressed like her, in body-hugging dresses and mini high heels; for those times, she was quite flashy. As the daughter of a high-ranking cadre, she was in a superior position, she was arrogant and willful but totally unromantic. However, you were only able to live in your books and your fantasies, your routine work was dead-boring. There were always zealots who wanted to get into the Party in order to become bureaucrats. They organized extra Mao's Selected Works study groups for after work and hassled people to attend. Anyone who didn't attend was considered ideologically unsound. It was only after nine or ten o'clock in the evening, when you got back to your room and sat at your own desk by the light of your desk lamp, that you were able to lose yourself in reverie and write your own things: that was you. In the daytime, in that world alien to yourself, you were always in a daze and always dozed off at meetings, because you would have stayed up all night. You were nicknamed "Dream," and you even answered to "Sleepy Bug."