Hard Like Water

by Yan Lianke

  Hongmei, Cheng Qinglin, and I immediately turned as white as sheets. As Hongmei gazed at me, a yellow sheen appeared on her pale face, and a layer of sweat formed on her forehead.

  “Hongmei,” I said calmly, “please collect the denunciations everyone has written. We mustn’t lose a single one.” (I was so great, I had the demeanor of a general.) I then turned in the direction of the shouts and ran back to the village. The villager who had been hollering looked in my direction, then shouted at me as though hurling bricks at my head.

  “Aijun, quick! Your wife has turned pale, and her tongue is sticking out! If you delay, you won’t have a chance to say a last word to her!”

  2. A Turning Point (II)

  Guizhi died.

  In a clatter, Guizhi died.

  As I was running back, the phrase Guizhi has hanged herself clattered through my brain like a chunk of ice, and once I got home the chunk exploded, leaving my body feeling simultaneously hot and cold, such that I could barely stand up straight. Guizhi hanged herself not long after I had come to the riverbank and was discovered when a neighbor came to borrow a bucket of water. By the time people rushed over and lowered her down from the roof beam, she had already stopped breathing, and her body was cold. The villagers then carried her into the entranceway and positioned her so her head was facing the courtyard, in the hope that the wind might bring her back from the dead. This hope, however, was quickly extinguished. She had already turned white, and when I separated myself from the crowd, I saw that her eyes were staring blankly ahead, her pupils covered by a cloudy film. I thought, what could have led her to do this, if not my failure to agree to pay homage to her father? But is a birthday really that important? Is it more important than your life? I bent over and placed my hand under her nostrils, attempting to grasp a thread with which I might pull her back to life. Her nose was so cold that it felt as though I were placing my hand under a block of ice. I realized she couldn’t be saved. I felt as though the revolution and I now faced a much more complicated predicament.

  I slowly stood up. The neighbors who had come to cut Guizhi down from the beam were all staring at me. Our children, Hongsheng and Honghua, were standing next to the body. They seemed to understand that something significant had occurred, though they weren’t sure exactly what. They stared at me with a look of terror and incomprehension, and after a while they came over to my side, and each of them took one of my hands. Needless to say, this was a moment of great potential danger. I recognized that this danger applied not only to me but also to Chenggang’s revolution and future, its direction and its route.

  All the people who had gathered on the riverbank ran up and fixed their gazes on my face. Inside and outside, everything became so quiet that you could hear the whirring sound of air circulating.

  I felt alarmed and frozen, as though countless icy insects were crawling over my body and into my heart.

  Hongmei walked over, deathly pale. She proceeded to pull Hongsheng and Honghua to her chest—like a mother hugging her own children.

  (Great Hongmei, I’ll love you even after I die!) As Hongmei was taking the children, I saw that beyond the crowd gathered in the entranceway, there was an object someone had smashed under a table nearby. I left Guizhi’s side and walked over, and the neighbors opened a path for me to walk through.

  Everyone watched as I headed into the room, whereupon I suddenly saw that the object under the table was a plaster bust of Chairman Mao. Someone had smashed it open. A Chairman Mao poster that had been hanging on the wall had also been taken down and ripped up, and the shreds had been crumpled into balls and tossed into the corner, under the table, around the grain jar, and behind the door. As for the four-volume set of Chairman Mao’s Collected Works that had been sitting on the table, two volumes were still in their original position, the third was open and balanced precariously on the edge of the table, and the rice-yellow cover of the fourth had been ripped into strips and tossed under the cabinet. I went into the east-side room, opened the door curtain, and saw that Mao’s poster that had been hanging on the wall above the table had also been ripped up. I rushed over to the west-side room, opened the door curtain, and saw that the Mao badges that had been sitting on the windowsill had been reduced to dust and starlight.

  (As Guizhi was ripping up and destroying these sacred artifacts, she must have been cursing me, saying, “Gao Aijun, try joining the revolution now! Gao Aijun, try joining the revolution now!” Guizhi, how could you have done this? This is an extraordinarily serious crime! … It occurred to me that after distributing two hundred leaflets throughout Chenggang, I hadn’t distributed one to Guizhi. It is certainly true that it is always darkest directly beneath the lamp!)

  I emerged from the west-side room.

  Glancing at the crowd of people watching me, I announced, “No one move; I want to protect the crime scene.”

  I located Cheng Qinglin in the crowd and said, “Quick, go notify the town police. Tell them to come immediately and to bring a camera.”

  Cheng Qinglin stared at me in confusion.

  I shouted, “Why are you still standing there?”

  Cheng Qinglin said, “Brother Aijun …”

  I stared at him angrily.

  Hongmei walked over and said, “I’ll go.”

  (Ah, the great, lovable Hongmei!)

  Cheng Qinglin didn’t say anything else and instead simply gazed at Hongmei. Then he seemed to realize something and promptly turned around and began to run out the door.

  I located Ren Qizhu and Tian Zhuangzhuang in the crowd, and said, “I want you to stand guard and make sure that no one enters the courtyard.”

  The two of them immediately headed to the entranceway. (Later, one of them was appointed to serve as the production team’s commander, and the other was appointed to serve as deputy commander.)

  Finally, I looked around at everyone in the room and said, “I want everyone to go out to the courtyard. This crime scene must be preserved intact.”

  Everyone retreated to the courtyard, leaving the room empty—that is, except for the crumpled and ripped-up sacred artifacts that were lying around, together with Guizhi’s lifeless body. Instantly, my family’s skepticism disappeared. It had been swallowed by a nervous atmosphere resembling a forest of weaponry and a shower of bullets. It had been squashed by the weight of political struggle. As I waited in the middle of the courtyard, I felt my face become as hard as iron. Hongmei quietly walked up to me, as though wanting to say something to comfort me. In the end, however, she simply stood there silently. I said, “I want you to take Hongsheng and Honghua away. We don’t want to frighten them.” On hearing this, her eyes teared up, and she led the children to a corner of the courtyard.

  Officer Wang, who had recently been appointed chief of police, hurried over with two uniformed cops, each of whom carried a fifty-seven-caliber pistol and had a Seagull-brand camera around his neck.

  Guizhi’s death scene was recognized officially as an anti-revolutionary suicide.

  3. A Turning Point (III)

  Cheng Tianqing went insane.

  Guizhi’s sudden death made him feel as though the world were collapsing, as though volcanoes were erupting, as though the Yellow River had flooded, as though the levees of the Yangtze had been breached, and as though the water of Bohai Bay had turned into gasoline and begun burning the coast of the mainland.

  There is an aphorism that articulates a fundamental truth, and offers a revolutionary perspective that philosophy will never be able to achieve: No event can ever owe its transformation to individual will alone. That day, Cheng Tianqing had taken a nap, then got up, washed his face, and strolled around the courtyard. He had been watching his son and daughter-in-law and his daughter and son-in-law in the courtyard preparing meat and vegetables, and enjoying the sight of his grandsons and granddaughters in a corner of the main room jumping rope and playing house. It was at that moment that his own happy days came to an end. Someone barged in and shouted, “Branch Secret
ary, I have terrible news! Guizhi has hanged herself!”

  Everyone in the Cheng courtyard froze in shock.

  Cheng Tianqing stared at the person who had just arrived, and asked, “What did you say?”

  The other person replied, “Guizhi has hanged herself. She hanged herself from a roof beam.”

  Before the founding of New China, Cheng Tianqing had been running around on the edges of the war zone, and therefore after hearing this news he was able to quickly collect himself and walk out of the house. From Center Cheng Street, he passed through an alley to reach Rear Cheng Street. By the time he got to my house, however, his pace had slowed dramatically. Ren Qizhu and Tian Zhuangzhuang, who were standing in the entranceway, didn’t dare stop him. Instead, they shouted, “Party Branch Secretary!” and “Uncle Tianqing!” When the people in the courtyard heard them, they opened a path for him to enter the house. But when Cheng Tianqing reached the doorway, he saw Guizhi’s pale face and glazed eyes and her tongue hanging out. He saw the pair of armed police standing in the entranceway. He saw the tall police chief taking photos of the ripped-up and destroyed Mao artifacts. Cheng Tianqing placed his hand beneath Guizhi’s nostrils (exactly as I had done) and then turned pale, his forehead and the bridge of his nose becoming covered in sweat. I assumed that at this point he would stand up heroically, cast his gaze over the crowd, looking for me, then grab my collar and ask, Why did Guizhi hang herself? Instead his gaze came to rest on those ripped-up and shattered sacred objects, as though he already knew, even before entering the house, what Guizhi had been doing before she hanged herself. (Wasn’t it the case that her family was always discussing me? Weren’t they always saying that I had been infected with a revolutionary illness, which is why Guizhi had vowed that one day she wanted to destroy our household’s revolutionary and divine objects?) Cheng Tianqing’s eyes came to rest on the police chief’s camera, then he called out, “Chief Wang.” Without removing his eye from the camera, straightening his back, or even turning his head, Chief Wang calmly replied, “Secretary Cheng, this is simply extraordinary! Out of Chenggang’s dozen or so production teams and its tens of thousands of residents, this is our first anti-revolutionary suicide!”

  Cheng Tianqing suddenly stood up from his daughter’s side, then replied coldly, “Chief Wang, it is too early to make a determination. It is up to your town mayor to determine whether or not this is an anti-revolutionary suicide.”

  The hand with which Chief Wang was taking pictures paused, and he looked at Cheng Tianqing in bewilderment. Then he asked, “What is your relation to the deceased?”

  Cheng Tianqing replied, “She’s my daughter.”

  Chief Wang said, “Oh,” then added, “Go ask all the local mayors to come here. Let them observe this scene, and see whether any of them dare to claim that this is not a case of an anti-revolutionary suicide.” As he was saying this, he resumed taking pictures, as though he didn’t think Cheng Tianqing was worth a second glance. (Chief Wang was truly a committed revolutionary! Thank you, Chief Wang, I salute you, you committed revolutionary!)

  Everyone present saw Cheng Tianqing’s face turn as green as fresh vegetables. He stared at Chief Wang, then at the policemen stationed in the entranceway. Finally he turned and walked away, heading in the direction of the town government complex. Everyone knew he was going to look for the mayor, but after he left that day, Cheng Tianqing never again returned to my home.

  Even after they buried Guizhi on the hillock, he didn’t reappear in the village.

  For seven days, there was no trace of him.

  For half a month, there was no trace of him.

  In fact, it was only after the harvest season, after the wheat had been planted, after the wheat seedlings had grown as tall as a finger, after there was a layer of green covering the brown soil—only then did he reappear. In less than two months, his hair had turned completely white. It was now long and disheveled, and there always seemed to be some feathers and straw stuck in it. The army coat he used to wear as soon as winter arrived was now nowhere to be seen, and whenever we saw him in front of the village, under the memorial arch, or in the rice paddies, he would always be wearing a filthy padded jacket that had a layer of dirt and grime on the collar even thicker than the collar itself. When the sun shone down on that collar, it produced a truly nauseating sight.

  He had gone mad. He had truly gone insane. (History really is able to make a joke!)

  After losing his mind, Cheng Tianqing could frequently be seen walking down the village streets, and whenever he encountered another villager he would either burst out laughing or else glare sullenly. If anyone raised their fist at him, he would immediately cower abjectly and cover his head with his arms. Sometimes he would even kneel down and start kowtowing, pleading abjectly, “My daughter has already died, so you mustn’t beat me … I’ve acknowledged my crimes; isn’t that enough? Given my status as a long-standing member of the Communist Party, and someone who joined the revolution before Liberation, please have mercy on me …”

  (He was truly a disgrace to the Party and to the older generation of revolutionaries!)

  He went mad protesting the injustice his daughter Guizhi had suffered. He filed a complaint at the county-level police station and the courthouse, but the people there simply said, “This is clearly a case of anti-revolutionary activity, so what are you complaining about?” He complained to the district-level courthouse, but the people there said, “Go home. Someone once was showing a movie and accidentally loaded the film in the camera the wrong way, such that all the political leaders appeared upside down. For this mistake, the culprit was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. It is fortunate your daughter hanged herself—because if she hadn’t, who knows how many times she would have been executed.”

  Eventually, Cheng Tianqing invoked his status as an Eighth Route Army veteran and filed a complaint at the provincial-level courthouse, saying that if his daughter was guilty, then it was right that she had died, but why should Gao Aijun—who had forced his daughter to take that step in the first place—get off scot-free? An indictment was delivered from Chenggang to the county Party secretary, who in turn passed it on to Chief Wang, who by that point had been reassigned to the county police station as a result of his success in cracking the anti-revolutionary case. That indictment listed twenty-six crimes committed by Cheng Tianqing, accompanied by the red handprints of seventeen witnesses. Chief Wang sent someone to retrieve Cheng Tianqing from the road to the provincial capital, where he had gone to file another complaint. When Cheng Tianqing saw those twenty-six indictments, he was left speechless.

  Of course, this doesn’t mean that his indictment was the immediate cause of his mental breakdown. The fundamental reason for his collapse was his new status as an enemy of the revolution. He was now a class enemy who was horrified by the revolution. We all knew that after the revolution swept in like a thunderstorm, the enemies would all experience severe mental breakdowns that would highlight everyone’s differences with respect to their relative significance, power, justice, solemnity, and class correctness.

  However, we couldn’t—and, indeed, we absolutely shouldn’t—forget the principle that breaking ten fingers is not as good as chopping off just one. We can’t—and shouldn’t—forget that although all enemies are but paper tigers, the nauseating infection in their bodies has nevertheless already begun to fester, producing a corpse-like stench that is corrupting our own bodies and society. Nor can we forget that we have merely taken the first step in our Long March, and that the road to revolution remains very long.

  In this way, the first step of the revolution succeeded.

  Heedless of hardship, we proceeded toward the lighthouse.

  4. A Diagram

  Chenggang’s revolution succeeded in a way that simultaneously accorded with and challenged our initial expectations. We followed the instructions of the higher-ups and transformed the local Party branch into a revolutionary committee and then established a new group o
f revolutionary leaders. For the convenience of those who arrive later, I’ll draw a diagram. You shouldn’t view this as a power distribution table for Chenggang’s social structure after the revolution but rather as a liaison diagram for Chenggang’s revolutionary work.

  A work list of the Chenggang production team’s newly developed Party branch:

  This diagram doesn’t explain anything, but it clearly demonstrates my achievements with respect to Chenggang’s revolution. It proves that the revolutionary blood inside me and Hongmei drove us to successful results, just as naturally as a sunflower faces the sun. This is how things stood: without revolution there is no power—because power is the object of revolution, and revolution is the means to achieve power. All of the revolution’s power is itself the product of power. At the same time, the revolution’s initial success demonstrates the need for struggle and self-sacrifice. It is common for people to lose their lives, and while some deaths are as weighty as Mount Tai, others are as light as a feather. If one dies for the sake of revolution, then one’s death is as weighty as Mount Tai; but if one dies for oneself, one’s death is lighter than a feather.

  Chapter 6

  Revolutionary Romanticism

  1. A Red Sea

  Being in charge of pursuing revolution and promoting production—this should have been my primary responsibility after I assumed my new position. However, Guizhi’s suicide impacted me very directly, and after her death my daughter, Honghua, would often wake up in the middle of the night crying for her mother: “Where’s my mom? I want my mom …” Her cries were as sharp and piercing as the great Lu Xun’s dagger, cutting through the endless night and making it impossible for me to fall back asleep. This, in turn, inevitably sapped my energy for the following day.

  Of course, after Guizhi’s death, my mother finally moved down from the hillock and returned to her son’s and grandchildren’s side. The town government convened a mass meeting of the Chenggang production brigade, and after the names of new members of the revolutionary committee had been announced, my mother brought me a bowl of rice and hesitantly asked, “Aijun, tell me the truth, was it on your account that your father-in-law stepped down?”