Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  You come to her door and beg her to open it. She says stop making a fuss, leave things as they are, she feels good now. She needs peace, to be free of desire, she needs time, she needs to forget, she needs understanding not love, she needs to find someone she can pour out her heart to. She hopes you won’t ruin this good relationship, she’s just starting to trust you, she says she wants to keep travelling with you, to go right to Lingshan. There’s plenty of time for getting together but definitely not right now. She asks you to forgive her, she doesn’t want to, and she can’t.

  You say it’s something else. You’ve found a faint light coming through a crack in the wall. Someone else is upstairs apart from the two of you. You ask her to come and have a look.

  She says no! Stop trying to trick her, stop frightening her like this.

  You say there’s a light flickering in a crack in the wall. You’re quite sure there’s another room behind the wall. You come out of your room and stumble through the straw on the floorboards. You can touch the tiles of the sloping roof when you put up an arm, and further on you have to bend down.

  “There’s a small door,” you say, feeling your way in the dark.

  “What do you see?” She stays in her room.

  “Nothing, it’s solid timber, without any joins, oh, and there’s a lock.”

  “It’s really scary,” you hear her say from the other side of the door.

  You go back to your room and find that by putting a big bamboo tub upside-down onto a pile of straw you can stand on it and climb onto a rafter.

  “Quick, what can you see?” she asks anxiously.

  “An oil lamp burning in a small altar,” you say. “The altar is fixed to the gable and there’s a memorial tablet inside. The woman of the house must be a shaman and this is where she summons back the spirits of the dead. The spirits of living persons are possessed and they go into a trance, then the ghosts of the dead attach themselves to these persons and speak through their lips.”

  “Stop it!” she pleads. You hear her sliding against the wall onto the floor.

  You say the woman wasn’t always a shaman, when she was young she was the same as everyone else, just like any other women of her age. But when she was about twenty, when she needed to be passionately loved by a man, her husband was crushed to death.

  “How did he die?” she asks quietly.

  You say he went off at night with a cousin to illegally cut camphor in the forest of a neighbouring village. The tree was about to fall when he somehow tripped on a root and lost his bearings. The tree was creaking loudly and he should have run away from it but instead ran towards it, right where it fell. He was pulverized before he could yell out.

  “Are you listening?” you ask.

  “Yes,” she says.

  You say the husband’s cousin was frightened out of his wits and absconded, not daring to report the accident. The woman saw the hessian shoes hanging on the carrying pole of a man bringing charcoal down from the mountain, he was calling as he went for someone to identify a corpse. How could she not recognize the red string woven into the soles and heels of the hessian shoes she had made with her own hands? She collapsed and kept banging her head on the ground. She was frothing at the mouth as she rolled around, shouting: Let all the ghosts of the dead and the wronged all come back, let them all come back!

  “I also want to shout,” she says.

  “Then shout.”

  “I can’t.”

  Her voice is pitifully muffled. You earnestly call out to her but she keeps saying no from the other side of the wall. Still, she wants you to go on talking.

  “What about?”

  “Her, the mad woman.”

  You say the women of the village couldn’t subdue her. It took several men sitting on her and twisting her arms before they managed to tie her up. From then on she became crazy and always predicted the calamities which would befall the village. She predicted that Ximao’s mother would become a widow and it really happened.

  “I want revenge too.”

  “On whom? That boyfriend of yours? Or on the woman who’s having an affair with him? Do you want him to discard her after he’s had his fun with her? Like he treated you?”

  “He said he loved me, that he was only having a fling with her.”

  “Is she younger? Is she prettier than you?”

  “She’s got a face full of freckles and a big mouth!”

  “Is she more sexy than you?”

  “He said she was uninhibited, that she’d do anything, he wanted me to be like her!”

  “How?”

  “Don’t be inquisitive!”

  “Then you know about all that went on between the two of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then did she know all that went on between the two of you?”

  “Oh, stop talking about that.”

  “Then what shall I talk about? Shall I talk about the shaman?”

  “I really want revenge!”

  “Just like the shaman?”

  “How did she get revenge?”

  “All the women were frightened of her curses but all the men liked chatting with her. She seduced them and then discarded them. Later on she powdered her face, installed an altar, and openly invoked ghosts and spirits. Everyone was terrified of her.”

  “Why did she do this?”

  “You have to know that at the age of six she was betrothed to an unborn child in the womb – her husband in the belly of her mother-in-law. At twelve she entered her husband’s home as a bride, when her husband was still a snotty-nosed boy. Once, right on these floorboards upstairs she was raped in the straw by her father-in-law. At the time she was just fourteen. Thereafter, she was terrified whenever there was no-one else in the house but the father-in-law and her. Later on, she tried cuddling her young husband but the boy only bit her nipples. It was hard waiting years until her husband could shoulder a carrying pole, chop wood, use the plough, and eventually reach manhood and know that he loved her. Then he was crushed to death. The parents-in-law were old and were totally dependent upon her to manage the fields and the household, and they didn’t dare to exercise any restraints on her as long as she didn’t re-marry. Both parents-in-law are now dead and the woman really believes she can communicate with the spirits. Her blessings can bring good fortune and her curses can bring disaster, so it’s reasonable for her to charge people incense money. What is most amazing is that she got a ten-year-old girl to go into a trance, then got the girl’s long-dead grandmother, whom the girl had never seen, to speak through the child’s mouth. The people who saw this were petrified . . . ”

  “Come over, I’m frightened,” she pleads.

  On the day I arrive on the shores of Caohai, where the Wu River begins, it is overcast and bitterly cold. Recently, a small building has been constructed on the shores of the lake – it is the new ranger station of the reserve. The rock foundations have been built up high and it stands in isolation in this vast stretch of swampland. The little road to it is nothing more than slushy soft mud. The lake has receded a considerable distance but what was once lake still has a few sparse reeds growing here and there. I go up the stone stairs at the side of the building where there are several rooms with the windows open and plenty of natural light. Specimens of birds, fish and crawling insects are piled up everywhere.

  The chief ranger is a large man with a broad face. He plugs in the electric heater, makes tea in a big enamel pot, sits on the heater and invites me to warm myself and have some tea.

  He says ten or so years ago, for several hundred kilometres around this high plateau lake, the mountains were covered in forests. Twenty years ago the thick black forests came to the shores of the lake and people often encountered tigers. Now these bald hills have been stripped bare and there is a shortage of firewood for cooking, not to mention heating. Especially during the past ten years, spring and winter have become intensely cold. Frost comes early and in spring there are severe droughts. During the Cultural Revolutio
n, the new county revolutionary committee resolved to implement a new initiative: draining off the water and converting it into fields. They mobilized one hundred thousand civilian workers from the county, blasted scores of drainage channels, and built retaining walls to reclaim this part of the lake for cultivation. But it wasn’t so easy to dry out a lake bed which had been saturated for several million years. That year there was a tornado over the lake and the locals said the Black Dragon of Caohai couldn’t stay and had flown away. The lake is now only one third of what it used to be and the surrounding area is all swampland which defies drying off or being restored to its original state.

  A powerful telescope has been installed at the window and the water several kilometres away is a dazzling white expanse through the lens. What the naked eye sees as a slight shadow turns out to be a boat. Two people are standing at the prow but their faces are indistinct. Another at the stern is moving about and seems to be casting a net.

  “It’s impossible to guard such a large area of lake. By the time you get there, they’ll have slipped off long ago,” he says.

  “Are there plenty of fish in the lake?” I ask.

  “It’s easy to haul in hundreds and thousands of catties of fish. The problem is they’re still using explosives. People are so greedy, it’s hopeless.” He is the chief ranger of the reserve and he is shaking his head.

  He says that during the 1950s a man with an overseas PhD came here voluntarily from Shanghai, all full of enthusiasm. He brought along with him four biology and marine life graduates and set up a wildlife breeding station on the shores of Caohai where he successfully bred coypu, ermine, speckle-headed geese and several species of fish and aquatic birds. However, he offended some peasant poachers and one day when he was passing a corn field he was ambushed and blindfolded. They tied a basket of corn around his neck, accused him of stealing the corn, and beat him until he coughed up blood. The county committee cadres wouldn’t stand up for an intellectual and the old man died without regaining consciousness. The breeding station disbanded and the coypu were divided amongst the various units of the county committee and eaten.

  “Does he have any family?” I ask.

  “No-one seems to know, the students who worked with him were transferred long ago to teach in universities in Chongqing and Guiyang.”

  “Hasn’t anyone taken an interest in the matter since then?”

  He says it was only when the county was sorting some old archives that they discovered ten or so of his notebooks. They contain many accounts of the ecology of Caohai. His research is meticulously detailed and he writes well. If I am interested he can show these to me.

  There is a hollow sound like an old person with a racking cough coming from somewhere.

  “What’s that noise?” I ask.

  “Cranes,” he says.

  He takes me downstairs. In the basement breeding room behind an iron fence is a one-metre high red-headed black neck crane and a few grey cranes. From time to time they make a hollow cry. He says the black neck crane injured its foot and was captured for treatment. The grey cranes are fledglings born this year and they were brought here from the nest before they could fly. In late autumn, flocks of cranes used to come here for the winter and were seen everywhere amongst the reeds and in the fields. Later on they were hunted near to extinction. Following the establishment of the reserve, the year before last more than sixty turned up, and last year more than three hundred black neck cranes flew here, and even a larger number of grey cranes. It’s only the red-headed cranes that haven’t started coming back.

  I ask if I can go onto the lake. He says if the sun comes out tomorrow he’ll pump up the rubber dinghy and go out on the lake with me. Today the wind’s too strong and it’s too cold.

  I take my leave, and stroll towards the lake.

  I follow a track on the slope of the mountain and come to a small village of seven or eight houses. The rafters and the supports are all made of stone. The only trees are the few growing in people’s courtyards and in front of houses – the trunks are slender, no bigger than a rice bowl. Some decades ago, I imagine the dark forest must have come right up to this village.

  I go down to the edge of the lake and walk on the earth embankment between the slushy mud. It is too cold to take off my shoes but as I go further on, the embankment gets softer and the mud sticking to my shoes gets thicker. Just ahead, the solid land comes to an end. At the water’s edge is a boat and a boy. He is holding a small bucket and a fishing rod. I want to reach him, and get him to take the boat out onto the water.

  “Will you take the boat out onto the lake?” He is barefoot, his trousers are rolled up above his knees and he looks to be thirteen or fourteen. But his eyes ignore me and are looking right over my head past me. I turn around and see someone waving to him from the village some distance away. The person is wearing a colourful jacket and looks to be a girl. I take another step towards the boy. My shoes sink right into the mud.

  “Ai – yi – ya – yo –” The shouting in the distance is incomprehensible but the voice is clear and beautiful. She must be calling him. The boy with the fishing rod dashes off right past me.

  It will be very hard to go any further but having reached the lake I have to get onto it to have a look. The boat is at most ten steps away, I just need to get one foot onto where the boy was standing, the mud there is clearly more solid, and I’ll be able to get into the boat. A bamboo punt-pole is at the prow and I can already see aquatic birds skimming the water between the reeds. They are probably wild ducks and they seem to be calling. A wind has risen from shore and I can hear the distant shouting of the two children but not the calls of the nearby birds.

  I think, if I can punt the boat out of the reeds I’ll get to this broad expanse of water and I’ll be able to drift about all alone in the middle of this lonely plateau lake. I won’t have to talk to anyone. It wouldn’t be bad at all to just vanish into this lake and mountain scenery where lake and sky unite.

  I pull up a foot and take another step. I sink deep into the mud right up to my calf. I don’t dare shift my weight onto my front leg for I know if it goes above my knee, I won’t have a chance of pulling myself out of the mire. I don’t dare try to move my back leg. I can neither go forward nor backward and am in an embarrassing dilemma. This is of course an absurd situation but at issue is not the absurdity but the fact that as no-one has seen me, no-one is laughing, and I won’t be rescued which is worse.

  Maybe they’ll see me in the upstairs telescope of the little ranger station, just like I had seen people on the boat. But I would just be a meaningless figure moving about, they wouldn’t be able to see my face. Even if they adjusted the lens, they’d only think I was some peasant taking the boat out to get a bit of extra income.

  On the lonely lake, even the aquatic birds have gone. The dazzling surface of the water imperceptibly grows hazy, twilight emanates from the reeds and the cold rises from underfoot. I am chilled all over, there are no cicadas chirping, no frogs croaking. Can this possibly be the primitive loneliness devoid of all meaning that I seek?

  On this chilly late-autumn night, dense heavy darkness encloses a totality of primitive chaos; indistinguishable are sky and earth, trees and rocks, and needless to say the road; you can only stay transfixed, lean forward, put out both arms to grope, to grope in this thick dark night; you hear it in motion, it is not the wind in motion but this darkness which is devoid of top bottom left right distance and sequence; you are wholly fused with this chaos, conscious only that you once possessed the outline of a body, but that this outline in your consciousness is rapidly vanishing; a light emanates from your body, dim like a candle in the darkness, a flame with light but no warmth, a cold light which fills your body, transcending the outline of your body and the outline of your body in your mind; you draw it into your arms, strive to guard this ball of light, this icy transparent consciousness; you need this sensitivity, you strive to protect it; a tranquil lake appears before you, on the other sh
ore is a wood with trees which have shed all their leaves and trees which haven’t shed all their leaves; the yellow leaves on the tall poplar and the two small pale yellow leaves on the black branches of the date tree tremble; bright red tallow trees, some thick and some sparse, are like balls of mist; there are no ripples on the lake, only reflections, clear and distinct, rich colours, many shades ranging from dark red to bright red to orange to light yellow to inky green, to greyish-brown, to bluish-white; on careful scrutiny these suddenly fade, turning into different shades of grey, black, white, like an old faded black and white photograph; vivid images lie before your eyes but instead of standing on the ground you are in another dimension, staring with bated breath at the images of your own mind; it is so tranquil, disturbingly tranquil, you feel it is a dream; there is no need to be anxious but you can’t help being anxious because it is too strangely tranquil.