Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  “Don’t think I’m praising how you dance,” she seizes the chance to start up again.

  “I’m not a professional dancer.”

  “Then why do you dance? To get close to women?”

  “There are ways of getting even closer.”

  “You’ve got a sharp tongue.”

  “That’s because your tongue never stops.”

  “All right, I’ll keep quiet.”

  She snuggles against you and you close your eyes. Dancing with her is sheer bliss.

  You meet again one night in the middle of autumn, when a chilly north-west wind is blowing. You are riding your bicycle into the wind and from time to time, chased by the wind, leaves and scraps of paper on the road fly up into the air. You decide to drop in on an artist friend to wait for the weather to calm down a bit before going on and turn off into a small lane lit by a dim yellow street light. Only one solitary person can be seen walking ahead with his head huddled down into his coat. You feel wretched.

  In this dark little courtyard, there is a faint, flickering light coming from his window. You knock on the door and a deep voice answers. He opens the door and warns you to watch out for the step because it is dark. The room is lit by a small candle which flickers from a sawn coconut shell.

  “This is great,” you say, really appreciating the warmth. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing in particular,” he replies.

  It is very warm in the room. He is only wearing a bulky woollen pullover and his hair is a mess. The chimney has already been fitted on the heater-stove for the winter.

  “Are you sick?” you ask.

  “No.”

  Something moves by the candle, you hear the springs creak on his dilapidated old sofa and realize that a woman is sitting at one end of it.

  “You’ve got a guest?” you say apologetically.

  “It’s all right.” Pointing to the sofa he says, “Sit down.”

  It is then that you see it is her, she lethargically puts out a limp and soft hand to shake. She is wearing her hair long and she blows away a loose strand hanging over the corner of her eye. You joke with her.

  “If I remember rightly, your hair wasn’t as long before.”

  “Sometimes I wear it up, sometimes I have it down, you simply didn’t notice.” She smiles petulantly.

  “Do you know one another?” your artist friend asks.

  “We danced together at a friend’s place.”

  “You still remember.” There is a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Is it possible to forget having danced with someone?” you say, sniping back.

  As he pokes the stove, the dark red fire lights up the paper canopy on the ceiling.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  You say you’re just passing by and can only stay for a short time.

  “I’m not doing anything in particular either,” he says.

  “It’s all right . . .” she adds, quietly.

  Afterwards, they both fall silent.

  “You two go on with what you were talking about,” I say. “I came in to warm up, there’s been a cold snap. When the wind dies down a bit, I’ll be on my way.”

  “No, you’ve come just at the right time,” she says. Again there is a silence.

  “It would be more accurate to say I’ve come at the wrong time.” You think you really should make a move to go but your friend doesn’t wait for you to start getting to your feet. He presses you down by the shoulders and says, “As you’re here, it will be possible to talk about something else. We’ve already finished saying what we were saying.”

  “You two go ahead, I’ll just listen.” She curls up on the sofa and only the outline of her pale face is visible, her lovely nose and mouth.

  After quite some time, she turns up on your doorstep at noon one day.

  “How did you know where I live?”

  “Aren’t I welcome?”

  “Quite the opposite. Come in, come in.” Your get her to come inside and ask if your artist friend had given her your address. In the past you had only seen her in dim lighting and didn’t dare say it was her for sure.

  “Maybe, maybe it was someone else, is your address a secret?” she answers with a question.

  You say you hadn’t thought she would honour you with a visit and that you are indeed greatly honoured.

  “You’ve forgotten it was you who invited me.”

  “That’s also quite possible.”

  “And it was you who gave me the address, had you forgotten that too?”

  “I must have,” you say. “Anyway, I’m really pleased you’ve come.”

  “How can you not be pleased with a model coming?”

  “You’re a model?” You’re even more surprised.

  “I’ve done modelling, moreover nude modelling.”

  You say, unfortunately, you’re not an artist but that you do do some amateur photography.

  “Do people who come always have to stand?” she asks.

  You hasten to point around the room. “Make yourself at home, feel free to do whatever you like. By looking at this room you can tell that the owner doesn’t have rules and regulations.”

  She sits herself down by the desk, glances around and says, “The place looks like it needs a woman owner.”

  “If you’d like to be, but it would only be owning the owner of the room, because the property rights to the room don’t belong to the owner of the room.”

  Each time you meet you engage in verbal sparring, but you mustn’t lose to her.

  “Thanks.” She takes the tea you have made and smiles. “Let’s talk about something serious.”

  She’s ahead again. You only have time to say, “All right.”

  After you fill your own cup and sit on the chair at the desk, you relax and turn to her.

  “We can start by discussing what to talk about. By the way, are you really a model?”

  “I was an artist’s model but I’m not anymore.” She blows away some strands of hair hanging on her face.

  “May I ask why?”

  “He got sick of painting me and found someone else.”

  “Painters are like that, I know. They can’t spend a whole lifetime painting the one model.” You have to defend your artist friend.

  “Models are the same, they can’t live just for the one painter.”

  She’s right, of course. You must get off the topic.

  “But are you actually a model? I’m asking about your occupation, is that job?”

  “Is that so very important?” She laughs again, she’s quite ingenious, always one step ahead of you.

  “It’s not all that important. I’m just asking so that I’ll know what to talk about, so that I can talk about something which might be of interest to both you and me.”

  “I’m a doctor,” she says with a nod. And before you get a chance to follow up, she asks, “Can I smoke?”

  “Of course, I smoke too.”

  You move the cigarettes and ashtray across the table to her.

  She lights a cigarette and inhales the smoke.

  “You don’t look like one,” you say, starting to catch onto her game.

  “That’s why I said what I do is unimportant. When I said I was a model, did you think I really was?” She tilts her head back and slowly exhales the smoke.

  And when you say you’re a doctor are you really a doctor? But you don’t articulate this.

  “Do you think all models are frivolous?” she asks.

  “Not necessarily, modelling is serious work, and there’s nothing bad in exposing one’s body, I’m talking about nude modelling. If nature endows one with beauty, then to present nature’s beauty can only be considered magnanimous, it has nothing at all to do with frivolity. Furthermore a beautiful human body is superior to any artwork. Art is invariably pale and insipid compared to nature and only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.”

  You prattle away with passion and conviction.

 
“Then why are you involved in art?” she asks.

  You say you haven’t got the expertise for art and are just a writer, saying what you want to say and whenever you want to.

  “But writing is also a form of art.”

  You insist that writing is a technical skill.

  “It just requires learning the technique, like you for example, you’ve learnt how to operate with a scalpel. I don’t know if you’re a surgeon or a physician but that’s not important. As long as you acquire the technique anyone can write just like anyone can learn how to use a scalpel.”

  She laughs.

  You go on to say you don’t believe that art is sacrosanct, art is just a way of life. People have different ways of life, art can’t represent everything.

  “You’re very intelligent,” she says.

  “You’re not exactly stupid yourself,” you say.

  “But some people are stupid.”

  “Who?”

  “Artists. They only perceive with their eyes.”

  “Artists have artists’ modes of perception, they rely more on visual perception than writers.”

  “Can visual perception allow one to understand a person’s intrinsic value?”

  “I don’t think so, but the crux of the matter is what is value? This differs according to the individual, people have their own ways of looking at this. It is only for those with similar values that different values have any meaning. I won’t be ingratiating and say that you are beautiful and I don’t know whether you are all beautiful inside, but I can say that it is enjoyable talking with you. Don’t people exist in order to have some pleasure? Only fools go out looking for unhappiness.”

  “I also feel happy when I am with you.”

  While saying this she unthinkingly picks up your key from the table and starts toying with it. You can see she is unhappy, so you start talking about the key with her.

  “What key?” she asks.

  “The key in your hand.”

  “What about the key?”

  You say you lost it.

  “Isn’t it here?” She shows you the key in her hand.

  You say you thought you had lost it but right now it is in her hand.

  She puts the key back on the table suddenly stands up and says she is leaving.

  “Is there something urgent?”

  “Yes,” she says, then adds, “I’m married.”

  “Congratulations,” you say with a tinge of bitterness.

  “I’ll come again.”

  That’s a relief. “When?”

  “When I’m feeling happy. I won’t come when I’m unhappy and make you unhappy. Nor when I am particularly happy–”

  “That’s obvious, suit yourself.”

  You also say you’d like to believe she will come again.

  “I’ll come and talk to you about the key you lost!”

  She tosses her head and her hair falls about her shoulders, then with an enigmatic smile she walks out the door and goes down the stairs.

  This old schoolmate of mine whom I haven’t seen for more than ten years takes out a photo from a drawer. It’s of him and another person in front of a broken-down temple with a vegetable patch next to it. The person could be middle-aged, elderly, or in between, and could be a man or a woman. He says it’s a woman. He asks if I know the Woman Warrior of the Desolate Plains.

  I do. When I had just started junior high school a classmate used to bring from home old righteous warrior novels, which were banned at school, like Seven Swords and Thirteen Righteous Warriors, Biography of the Swordsman of Emei and Thirteenth Younger Sister. If you were a friend you could take the book home for the night and if you weren’t a friend you had to put it in the drawer of your desk and surreptitiously read it during class.

  I also remember when I was even younger, I had a picture-book set of Woman Warrior of the Desolate Plains and lost some of the pages at a game of marbles. The set was broken and I was really upset.

  And I recall it was this Woman Warrior of the Desolate Plains or Thirteenth Younger Sister or some other woman warrior who had something to do with my awakening from youthful ignorance about sex. It was probably an illustrated book in a second-hand bookshop. Early in the book a picture showed a branch of peach blossoms scattered by a storm with a caption below, something like “Untold misery after a night of wind and rain”, implying that the woman warrior had been raped by some rogue who was also an exponent of the martial arts. On a later page the woman warrior has sought out an expert from the highest ranks of the martial arts world and she has learnt the secret art of the flying knives. Her mind set on revenge, she eventually tracks down her enemy. Her flying knives pin him by the head but for some reason she is sad and simply cuts off one of his arms and leaves him with a means to go on living.

  “Do you believe that women warriors still exist?” my old schoolmate asks.

  “The woman in the photo?” I can’t tell if he’s joking.

  This tall, bespectacled, old schoolmate of mine in the photo is wearing a geological fieldwork outfit. He has a rustic look and reminds me a little of Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. When I first read the novel he was quite thin although at the time he was already wearing glasses on his kindly round face. His glasses as always are sitting on his nose and he looks very much like that bookish character in the illustrations of Tolstoy’s works by a Russian artist. However the woman warrior by his side, who comes just to his shoulders, is dressed like a peasant in a big coat with buttons down the front, baggy trousers and a pair of shovel-nose army galoshes. She has a genderless face with small eyes and the only indication of her being female is her ear-length hair cropped in the style for women cadres in the villages. She in no way resembles the women warriors of my novels, paintings, and picture-books, poised for battle in their belted fighting clothes in breathtakingly heroic stances and with beautiful phoenix-like eyes.

  “Don’t underestimate her. She’s every bit an expert in the martial arts and has killed lots of people,” he says seriously.

  On my way east from Zhuzhou, the train is running behind schedule and stops at a small station, probably to let through the special express coming from the other direction. When I see the name of the station, I suddenly remember that this old classmate of mine works here with a mining exploration team. We hadn’t been in touch for over ten years, then last year the editor of a publishing house forwarded the manuscript of a novel this old classmate had sent me. The name of this place was written on the envelope. I don’t have his address on me but there couldn’t be that many exploration teams in a small place like this and it shouldn’t be hard to track him down. I get off the train right away. He is a good friend from childhood days. There aren’t many happy things in life and it is wonderful to meet old friends by chance.

  When I set out from Changsha with a change of trains at Zhuzhou I had not intended to make a stopover. I had neither relatives nor anyone I knew in Zhuzhou, and there were no folk customs or archaeological artefacts to investigate. Nevertheless, I spent a whole day wandering along the Xiang River and in the city. It was only afterwards that I realized it was to track down yet another, it would seem, futile image from the past.

  It was twelve or thirteen years since I was hounded out of Beijing carrying a bedroll like a refugee to undertake “re-education” at what was known as the May Seventh Cadre School located in this mountainous region. As a child, I had once fled as a refugee through this very region. Personal relationships within organizations were tense because of the constantly changing political movements and people were shouting slogans and clinging tenaciously to their own factions for fear of being labelled the enemy by their opponents. Then suddenly a new “highest instruction” arrived and army representatives were stationed in all cultural organizations and everyone was moved en masse to this mountain region to work in the fields.

  I have been a refugee from birth. When my mother was alive she said she gave birth to me while planes were dropping bombs. The windows of th
e delivery room in the hospital had strips of paper pasted on them to stop them shattering when there were explosions. Luckily she escaped the bombs and I was born safely. However, I couldn’t cry and it was only with the doctor slapping my bottom that I could cry. My birth probably predetermined my habit of being perpetually on the run in life and I have grown accustomed to upheavals and learnt to find a little pleasure in the intervals between. So while the others of our group of evacuees at the time were sitting in a daze on their bedrolls and waiting on the platform, I left my bedroll with someone and, like a stray dog, wandered around the streets and alleys of the city. I ran into a diehard from an opposition faction in a little restaurant. At the time pork was rationed and each person was allotted one meat coupon per month which could be used to buy one jin of meat. I guessed that he, like me, must have wanted to eat meat. The restaurant turned out to have dog meat with chilli. I and he each ordered a plate. I and he had both been reduced to living away from home and so shared a table and began to squabble over buying the liquor. The two of us drank liquor and ate dog meat as if this life and death class struggle did not exist, neither was an enemy and of course neither mentioned politics. There was in fact quite a lot to talk about – in this old street without coupons you could buy toilet paper smelling like hay, local cloth and tea. You could also buy five-spice peanuts which you couldn’t even get in Beijing. He and I had bought some and took them from our bags to put on the table to eat with the liquor. It was this scrap of inconsequential memory led me to spend an entire day at Zhuzhou when changing trains during the journey from Changsha. So there is every reason for me to bring some unexpected happiness to a good friend from the days of my youth.