Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  I book a bed at a hostel and deposit my backpack. If I can’t find him, at least I’ll be able to have a sleep at the hostel then catch the early morning train.

  I eat a bowl of green soya bean porridge at the stall selling late night snacks and my fatigue vanishes. I ask the public office cadre who is slouched in a chair and cooling off outside the entrance to the tax office if there is a mining exploration team in the area. He sits up and immediately confirms that there is – first he says it is two li off, then three, and at most five. At the end of the street where there are no streetlights, I go into the small lane, through the paddy fields, across the small river over the wooden bridge, and on the other side not far off are some isolated new-style buildings. That’s the exploration team.

  It is a summer night and the sky is filled with stars and everywhere I can hear the din of croaking frogs. I step into a puddle but this doesn’t worry me, I am determined to find my friend and about midnight I have groped my way through the dark and am knocking on his door.

  “You devil!” he calls out, excited and surprised. Big and fat and clad in nothing but a pair of shorts, he wildly hits at me with his big reed fan and stirs up a breeze. It is that old habit from childhood when everyone used to slap one another on the shoulders. At the time I was the youngest and everyone in the class called me Little Devil. Now I suppose I am an old devil.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I crawled up out of the ground,” I say. I too am really happy.

  “Bring out some liquor, no, bring some watermelon, it’s too hot,” he calls out to his wife, a solid, sturdy woman who seems to be a local. She smiles but says very little. He has obviously settled here but has lost nothing of his earlier bravado.

  He asks if I received the manuscript he sent. He says he saw some of the things I had published over the past few years, thought it had to be me, so he sent the manuscript to the editorial department of one of the publishers and asked them to forward it. It worked and we have actually made contact. He says he also has an urge to write, an irrepressible urge, so he wrote this to see how it would go.

  What can I say? This novel of his was about a country boy scorned by his classmates because his grandfather was an old landlord and every day he listened to his teacher saying that the lines between class enemies had to be clearly demarcated. He felt that the source of all his miseries stemmed from this ailing old man who simply wouldn’t die, so he put into the old man’s medicinal brew some medical cherry flower, a noxious weed which even has to be picked out of greenfeed for pigs. The next morning, when the village public broadcast system started singing “The East is Red” to summon the villagers to the fields to work, the boy woke and saw the old man sprawled on the ground. His mouth was covered in black blood and he was dead. It was a novel about the psychology of a child, and examined this senseless world through the eyes of a peasant boy. I showed the manuscript to an editor I knew. He didn’t give the usual spiel for rejecting manuscripts by spouting off a whole lot of official literary jargon like the episodes lack refinement, it is poorly conceived, the characters are not convincing or it lacks typicality in presentation. Instead, he said bluntly that he thought it was well written but that the author had gone too far – the leadership would certainly not approve so the work was therefore unpublishable. I could only say that the author was doing exploration work in the countryside and was used to how it was in the mountains. He couldn’t be expected to understand the criteria of the present literary world. This is exactly what I tell him.

  “But where is the criteria?” he says with incomprehension showing in his eyes just like the bookworm Pierre. “Didn’t the newspapers announce some days ago that creative freedom has to be considered and that literature has to portray the truth?”

  “It’s because of this damn portraying the truth that misfortune has befallen me and I have fled here,” I say.

  He laughs heartily and says, “Then forget the story about this Woman Warrior of the Desolate Plains.”

  He throws the photo into the drawer, then says, “I stayed for a few days in that broken-down temple while I was doing exploratory work and got to know her. While chatting I hit on something that was troubling her and she ended up talking to me for a whole day. I filled half a notebook with her personal experiences.”

  He takes out a notebook from the drawer and, waving it in front of me, says, “There’s enough here to write a book. I’ve even thought of a title: Jottings from the Broken-down Temple.”

  “This doesn’t sound like the title for a woman warrior novel.”

  “Of course not. If you’re interested, take it with you to use as material for a novel.” Saying this he tosses the notebook back into the drawer and says to his wife, “Bring out the liquor after all.”

  “It’s not just fiction,” I say, “I can’t even publish those prose pieces I used to write. As soon as they see my name on a manuscript they reject it.”

  “You’d best stick to doing your geology and not fool around with writing,” his wife says when she brings the liquor.

  “Now tell me the situation with you now!” He’s very concerned.

  “I’m wandering everywhere to avoid being investigated. I’ve been gone for several months. I’ll go back when it’s safe, after the trouble blows over. If things get worse, I’ll look over a few places and if necessary slip away. In any case I’m not going to be the way I was during those years I was labelled a rightist, obediently allowing myself to be led like a sheep to be reformed through labour.”

  The two of us laugh heartily.

  “How about I tell you a happy story? When I was part of a small team sent to look for gold, we captured a Wild Man in the mountains,” he says.

  “Stop joking, did you see it with your own eyes?” I ask.

  “So what if I saw it, we captured it! We were going along a mountain ridge to cut down on the distance so that we could get to the campsite before dark. A patch of the forest under the ridge had been burnt off and planted with corn. Something was moving in the yellow cornfield and looking down we could clearly see it was some sort of wild animal. At that time we all carried rifles for safety into mountains like these. The team said it’s either a black bear or a wild pig, if we can’t find gold but can get hold of some meat, at least it’ll be lucky for our mouths. We split up and started closing in. This thing heard us moving and charged away towards the forest. It was past three in the afternoon and the sun had moved to the west but it was still quite light. When the thing started running its head popped out from amongst the ears of corn. It was a long-haired Wild Man. We all saw it and, wild with excitement, started yelling Wild Man! Wild Man! Don’t let it get away! Then there were gunshots. We had been going through the mountains and gullies all day and hadn’t had a chance to fire a shot, so we were letting off steam. We had all livened up and were running, yelling and shooting. When we closed in we managed to force it out. It was stark naked and its balls were shining. It raised its hands to surrender then crashed to its knees onto the ground. It had a pair of glasses tied to its head with a piece of string, the lens were so worn they were like frosted glass.”

  “You’re making this up, aren’t you?” I say.

  “Did all this really happen?” his wife isn’t asleep and calls out from the bedroom.

  “If I were making it up I wouldn’t be able to make it up better than you, you’re a novelist.”

  “He’s the real storyteller,” I call out to his wife, looking in the direction of the bedroom. “He’s a brilliant storyteller, in the old days no-one could outdo him at storytelling. Whenever he started telling a story he had everyone listening. Unfortunately, the only story he has written was executed before it was published.” I can’t help feeling somewhat sorry for him.

  “He’s only talking like this because you’re here. Usually he never says a sentence more than he has to,” his wife says.

  “Stick to listening,” he says to his wife.

  “Go on with the story!
” He’s really got me interested.

  He takes a drink and is refreshed.

  “They went up to him, took off his glasses, prodded him with their rifles and questioned him harshly. If you’re human, why are you running? He was shaking all over and making incomprehensible noises. One of the fellows pressed a rifle at him and threatened, if you keep putting on this act I’ll shoot you! At this he started crying and said he had escaped from a labour camp and was too afraid to go back. We asked, what crime did you commit? He said he was a rightist element. Our man asked, what year was the rightist element campaign? The decision changing all that was long ago, why didn’t you go back? He said his family was too afraid to take him back so he hid on this mountain. We asked where his home was and he said Shanghai. The men said, your family are all fucking fools, why didn’t they take you in? He said they were afraid of getting implicated. The men said, like hell they’d get implicated, rightist elements have all received compensations plus big salary back payments. Everyone is just wishing for a rightist element in the family. They also asked, are you suffering from some sort of mental illness? He said he didn’t have any illness, except for severe shortsightedness. The men in the team thought it was all too hilarious.”

  We can hear his wife laughing in the bedroom.

  “It’s you who’s a devil, only you could tell this sort of a story.” I also can’t help laughing. It has been a long time since I’ve been so happy.

  “He was labelled a rightist in 1957 and in 1958 was sent to a labour reform farm in Qinghai. During the famine of 1960 there was nothing to eat and he became bloated with beri-beri and almost died. He escaped to Shanghai and hid at home for two months to recuperate. His family insisted that he return because at the time grain rations weren’t enough to feed the family and what was more, how could they possibly hide him at home for such a long time. It was then that he was forced to flee into the mountains, some twenty years ago. We asked him how he had survived all these years. He said in the first year a family in the mountains took him in and he helped them by chopping wood and doing some farm work. Afterwards the commune below heard rumours about him and wanted to investigate his background. He then escaped to this big mountain and relied on the family to secretly bring him some food, matches and a bit of oil and salt. We asked how he came to be branded a rightist. He said he was doing research on the oracle scripts on tortoise shells and animal bones, at the time he was young and hot-blooded and said a few crazy things about the authorities at a meeting. Everyone said come with us and go back to doing research on your oracle scripts. He stubbornly refused and said he had to harvest the corn because it was his grain supply for the year. He was afraid if he went, it would be trampled by wild pigs. We uproariously said, let them shit on it! He said he had to fetch his clothes. We asked him where they were. He said in a cave under the cliff. If it wasn’t too cold he usually begrudged wearing them. Someone gave him a shirt and got him to tie it around his waist, then we took him back with us to camp.”

  “Is that the end?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ve thought of another conclusion but I’m not too sure about it.”

  “Try telling it then.”

  “A day later, after having plenty to eat and drink, he woke from a deep sleep and suddenly started to bawl loudly. We couldn’t work out what was wrong and went to ask him. Tears and mucus were streaming down his face and he blubbered for a long time, before blurting: ‘If I’d known there were so many good people in the world I wouldn’t have endured so many years of unjust punishment!’”

  I feel like laughing but can’t.

  There is a wily glint behind his glasses.

  “The conclusion is superfluous,” I say after some thought.

  “I deliberately tacked it on,” he admits, taking off his glasses and putting them on the table.

  I discover that his far-sighted eyes are not so much wily as miserable and that he is completely different from the perpetually jovial good-natured person he is with his glasses on. I have never seen him like this before.

  “Do you want to lie down for a while?” he asks.

  “It’s all right, I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway,” I say.

  Outside the window, dawn is breaking. The summer heat has completely subsided and a cool, gentle breeze is coming in.

  “We can chat lying down,” he says.

  He sets up a bamboo-slat bed for me, takes a canvas deck chair for himself, puts out the light, and lies back in the deck chair.

  “I must tell you that at the time I was investigated by this very group which captured the Wild Man. They almost shot me – their bullets whizzed past my head and it was sheer luck that I wasn’t accidentally killed. When things don’t concern oneself, everyone is a good fellow.”

  “This is what is special with your story about the Wild Man, people enjoy listening to it. People are cruel and there’s no need for you to try to explain it.”

  “You’re talking about fiction, I’m talking about life. It seems that I wouldn’t be able to write fiction.”

  “As soon as there’s talk of lice, everyone starts catching them, afraid that they themselves are lice. So what can you do?”

  “What if people don’t try to catch them?”

  “Then they’ll be afraid of being caught.”

  “Didn’t you refuse to catch them?”

  “So I was caught.”

  “And so the wheels roll on like this.”

  “I guess there must have been some progress, otherwise would I have dared to come to look you up for a drink? I would have gone off long ago to become a Wild Man.”

  “And I wouldn’t have been able to take you in either. Otherwise, maybe we two good friends would have gone off together to be Wild Men.” He laughs so much that he has sat up. “It’s better without the conclusion,” he says on reflection.

  You say he’s lost the key.

  She says she understands.

  You say he clearly sees the key on the table then when he turns around it is no longer there.

  She says, yes, yes.

  You say, it is a plain key, a key without a key ring. It used to have a key ring with a curly-haired red plastic Pekinese dog on a chain, but before that it didn’t have a key ring. That was a present from a friend of his, of course a girl friend but not a girlfriend.

  She says she understands.

  You say, afterwards the dog broke. It was quite funny, it broke at the neck so that there was only the little red head of the dog. He thought it was cruel so he took the key off the key ring.

  I understand, she says.

  You say it is just a plain key. He seems to think he put it on the lamp stand on the table, together with some drawing pins. The drawing pins are there but the key has vanished. He shifts the books from one end of the table to the other. There are a few letters waiting to be answered but he hasn’t worked out how to answer them. There is also an envelope over the switch. You say he just can’t see the key.

  It’s often like that she says.

  He has to go out for an appointment but can’t leave the door unlocked. And if he locks the door and doesn’t have the key he won’t be able to get back in. He has to find the key. Books, paper, letters, a bit of money, a few coins are on the table. It is easy to see a key amongst coins.

  Yes.

  But the key isn’t there. He crawls under the table and sweeps out quite a bit of dusty fluff with a broom, there’s even a bus ticket. If the key had fallen onto the floor it would have made a noise. There are some books on the floor and he goes through them and restacks them. Books and keys are quite different and aren’t easily confused.

  Of course not.