by Arnold Zable
Some say that Han Shan’s poems were written by the three of them. There are three of us, N laughs, but it is not clear who of us is Han Shan, and who are the sidekicks. Maybe we will know by the end of the journey.
Out there, in those lakes, he says, there are salamanders. They are as slippery as eels and as mysterious as your platypus, with the feet of lizards, the heads of turtles and flat toothless mouths that open into pink caverns. They bite and claw farmers who try to catch them to sell as delicacies. They can move fast both on land and in water. Baby fish, the villagers call them, after the cry they make.
There is a story, N says: Not so long ago, many salamanders were lured by villagers from the underground caves they lived in. They scurried from the secure darkness of their hideouts, and scampered up trees in search of a space beyond the reach of their predators. N shakes his head, as if seeing the fugitive salamanders now, chased by their tormentors, somewhere out there beyond the carriage window.
It is twelve kilometres from the station by mountain pass to Q’s home town, a world away in another valley. We travelled by jeep up a muddied roadway, our progress hindered by the steep ascent and the approach of darkness. Vehicles returning to the station crawled past. Drivers paused to pass on news of the road conditions. On the sharp descent, the town appeared like a field of lanterns enclosed within the rim of the valley.
We crossed a bridge over a river and were dropped off at Q’s home. We deposited our bags and went out immediately. In the streets, we saw posters headed by an image of a skull and crossbones, and bearing the photos of two men who were to be executed the following morning. Their crimes were listed under each photo.
People hurried past, averting their gaze, as if to stop and look for too long would taint them. The condemned men were reminders of the power of the State—and of mortality. We must purge crime from all corners of this country, proclaimed banners stretched across the streets. Let it serve as a warning. Stray from the path and this is the fate that awaits you.
We slept that night in Q’s home. I woke in the early hours to howling dogs and crowing roosters. The rain resumed. It drummed on the roof and against the shutters. Somewhere nearby, two men were spending their last night among the living. As the first light seeped in, there arose the sound of a pig being slaughtered. Its screams were human, rising in intensity.
I looked out of the window at the courtyard. Tied down by ropes, the pig fought with ferocity. The shouting of the men holding it down grew louder. A fierce battle was taking place, with an inevitable outcome. Finally, the animal fell silent. Its suffering was at an end. For the doomed prisoners, however, the journey to the execution grounds had not yet started.
Six years ago, Q’s father lay dying. In his final days, party officials and farmers filed by his bed to farewell him. They sat by his side, drank tea and recalled times past like ageing veterans at a reunion. In what would be his last night, Q’s father roused himself from his bed and made his way on unsteady feet to the table. He asked his wife and children to sit beside him as he wrote his last will and testament.
His life had spanned the final years of the Long March, the Japanese occupation, civil war and the triumph of revolution. He had wept at Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic and had lived through Mao’s death and with it the death throes of the Cultural Revolution. He had been in his prime in the 1950s, the springtime of revolution, when comrades danced waltzes and tangos and when true believers devoted their lives to the collective. He had endured the Great Leap Forward, the dark years of famine, and the descent into chaos and recrimination, denunciation and rehabilitation. And he had survived it all, each swing of the pendulum, each dictum. He was a foot soldier, a party functionary, self-effacing.
Q was, like his father, a loyalist and a battler. Unlike his father, he had the pallor of a man who spent his days in study. His face was smooth, and his hair neatly cut. He was invariably dressed in a regulation blue Mao suit, spotless and pressed, and he began each day with his shoes polished. Despite all that had transpired, he too remained a true believer. His goal as an agricultural scientist was to serve the people, he said, as his father had before him; and, as had generations before them, shaped by a far older convention of subservience to dynastic powers and emperors.
The framed testament hung on the wall beneath a photo of Q’s father, taken in his final months. His face is gaunt and his gaze direct, touched by an air of sadness and forbearance. Q helped his father dissolve the inkstick in a bowl of water. He placed the brush in his hand and steadied the parchment as he wrote the sentiments he was so anxious to bequeath him.
Q watched the ink flowing from his brush, and the characters taking shape as the ink dried, assuming permanence. He was taken by his father’s unhurried composition of the words that would outlive him. The characters formed vertical columns. Despite Q’s assistance, the hand that painted them remained unsteady, as was to be expected of a man who had risen from his deathbed. This had given the characters a unique quality prized in the art of calligraphy.
A person’s character, said N, as he stood beside us in front of the testament, is indicated in the manner of their calligraphy. It reveals whether they are open or secretive, outgoing or withdrawn, weak or decisive. You can tell whether the strokes were applied in a state of confusion or harmony, whether in haste or calm deliberation, in stiff control or wild abandon. The characters applied by Q’s father, N said, indicated his steadfastness in the face of adversity.
Q translated the document for me and wrote the English words in fountain pen. He sat at the table at which his father had written his testament, bent over an exercise book, intensely focused. He applied pressure on the down strokes and paused after each sentence. The letters leaned to the right in perfect unison. The ink could be seen drying as each letter was written.
Q had refined his English script through many hours of practice, copying the letters over and again from templates of perfection. He saw writing as an art form regardless of which script he was using. The neat strokes reflected the character of a man who took pride in following correct procedure.
Yet, there were hints of something else—modest flourishes in some of the letters, and in the tails of the g’s and j’s, the y’s and p’s. Perhaps one day he would abandon his adherence to routine, and embark on journeys to unknown destinations.
The document is headed Testament. The first people Q’s father addresses are his comrades, followed by family, conforming to a prescribed order of priorities:
Respected, loyal revolutionaries, family, friends, Comrade T, my dear Q, X, H, J and P—my children. There is no living without death, but no death without living. Everyone dies. Death is also one of the joys of life.
During the period of my illness, I have often reflected on my forty years of revolutionary work, my political thoughts, and my way of life. I feel that my actions have always been guided by the wishes of the party, the people and my conscience. I welcome peacefully the coming of my last day: I have no tears or sorrow, or any pain or terror before death.
The leaders of the government, good friends, general comrades, residents of the town and peasants have come to see me in my final weeks, and extended their regards to me. The Party, people and comrades have offered their respect, so I feel that I will die happily.
In response to the Party’s great and correct call that our work must be guided by the Four Modernisations of socialism, I shall take the method of cremation. My bone ash will be put in a plastic bag, and hence save a little money for the Party, and a little material wealth for society. I consider this as my last contribution to the Four Modernisations.
My simple coffin will be an old cotton uniform, a pair of old socks, a pair of old shoes and an old straw hat. I hope that Comrade T will faithfully do this in accordance with my wishes. If any changes are made because of affection for the old ideas, it will be false to our love and a shame for me. I ask the leaders of the government, and my affectionate friends, to carry this out
.
After my cremation, half of my bone ash will be carried back to my home town and will be cast over the place where I last worked for the Party, to encourage the farmers to continue the experiment of no-ploughing rice method.
Signed: Y’s last words for his family.
Q’s father saw himself as a humble comrade. He would not allow himself any self-indulgence. He was much like my own imprisoned father, observed N, but with less guile, and on a lower rung in the party hierarchy. Unlike N’s father, Q’s father would never have risen to high office. He had remained a party functionary. My father, said N, was far more ambitious, and there came a time when his ambition got the better of him. In retrospect, from his prison cell, he would have envied Q’s father.
In the evening, we sat with Q’s mother, his siblings and their spouses, nieces and nephews around a knee-high circular table, constructed around a charcoal burner. Embedded in the earth floor, and enclosed in guard rails, it heated the room and warmed the food that simmered in a hotpot that sat on a grate above the glowing embers. The rice wine flowed and the family was at ease, engaged in idle chatter. There was no mention of the pending executions.
The following evening, there appeared a sequence of photos on display boards depicting the execution, along with a skull and crossbones and the words: ‘This is the fate that awaits criminals.’ The condemned men are pictured standing in the courtroom docks as the judge passes the verdict. Then they appear at a town meeting, where they are denounced and their crimes are recounted. They are paraded on the back of a truck en route to the place of execution. Bystanders look on passively. They are participants in a set piece. The prisoners’ fate was as certain as that of the pig on the previous evening, trussed up for slaughter.
They are on their knees, heads bowed, with the firing squad lined up, guns aimed at their hearts, the order to shoot imminent. Then slumped on the ground, their hands tied, knees drawn to their chests. Their bodies are curled in on themselves, as if seeking a return to the womb, maternal affection. A red cross blots out the name of each executed man, accompanied by the inscription: ‘The criminal has been wiped out.’
Posted just hours after the men’s death, the black and white images seemed to already belong to a distant past. The men’s faces haunted me: fear and humiliation tempered by resignation. Expressions as fixed as the sentiments in Q’s father’s final testament.
We continued our journey by jeep. High above the town we stopped, stepped out and looked down on the valley. The town was situated between the two branches of a river. On the upper slopes stood a cluster of Buddhist temples and pavilions, interspersed by stone steps carved into the mountain. And, higher up, a spread of tombstones and a recent burial site, marked by a wreath of flowers and white cloths, frayed after days of exposure.
From our viewpoint, the dwellings were a congregation of tiled roofs flanked by pebbled riverbanks spread with sheets and clothing. The slap of women beating clothes could be faintly heard about us. Multi-storeyed wooden houses looked down on the river from stone ramparts, well clear of the flood line. Boatmen poled barges laden with barrels of fuel, fruit and vegetables.
I was overtaken by a vague sadness; and an impulse to remain here, a foreigner who had strayed off the path, lured by the stillness. A convoy of army vehicles eased their way over a bridge. People moved unhurriedly about their business. Below us, an enclosed world and a sense of time slowing, and above us, a vista of wind-driven clouds and snow-capped pinnacles.
And beyond, intimations of valley after concealed valley in a province where, for millennia, those who had fallen out of favour were banished from Imperial courts and the centres of power. Until this day, Guizhou Province had served as a place of exile for outcasts and renegades, the falsely accused, and the outspoken, ‘dangerous elements’. Beyond sight and marooned in the outposts of empire.
We were dwarfed by a dramatic landscape, as insignificant as figures in a Chinese painting. Everything seemed poised, at a standstill. We did not want to move. Gusts of cold wind reared up from the valley and, reaching above the sound of the wind, N’s voice, reciting Han Shan:
I climb the road to Cold Mountain.
The road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones,
The stream broad and banked with grass.
Moss is slippery, though no rain has fallen,
Pines sigh, but it isn’t the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
And sit with me among the white clouds?
We continued our journey by bus, passing hamlets of clay houses and thatched cellars storing grain and sweet potato. We spent nights in village inns or with the families of students returned home for the festival. The bus laboured on the heights past farmers climbing the steep slopes between the terraced paddies.
The passengers were lulled into slumber by the drone of the engine and the faint sound of an infant singing. The reverie was jolted by a baby screaming, as if she had suddenly woken and sensed the immensity of the world about her: precipices at the edge of the earth plummeting into a frightening infinity. Even those who had lived here their entire lives now seemed in awe of the scale of the landscape.
They had left the comfort and commerce of the valley and were in thrall to places that could not be tamed, despite their efforts to domesticate them. Again, I was overcome by a sense of time slowing and the temptation to vanish. Who can break from the snares of the world/ And sit with me among the white clouds?
In the depths of a valley, on the banks of a river, in a two-storey wooden house, lived a stone carver. He worked at a bench strewn with files, chisels, knives and gouges, mallets and hammers. As he worked he told us his story.
There were three families who practised the craft of inkstand carving in the valley. Each possessed its unique style dating back centuries. He practised a style known as Dragons Playing for Treasure. He had displayed an aptitude for carving as a young boy, and was apprenticed to his uncle at nineteen.
For the first three years, he cleaned his uncle’s rooms, washed and cooked and ran errands. He was not allowed to handle the tools. He would hide and watch his uncle at work, in secret. He set himself a rigorous program of exercise to build up strength in his hands, shoulders and forearms. When he was finally allowed to practise, he worked many hours perfecting his craft, emulating his uncle’s movements. He picked up the skills quickly.
In time, he was judged to have attained enough mastery to practise alone. From his hands, there flowed figures of dragons and tigers doing battle, phoenixes rearing towards the sun, serpents swimming, turtles paddling, birds perched on plum blossoms and goldfish at play in turbulent waters.
When he worked, the carver inhabited the worlds of his creations. Each line incised in the stone followed its prescribed path, sculpting forms handed down through generations. Yet there was also something of the carver’s own, individual lines shaped by the living hand while in harness to something greater.
When he raised his head, he was greeted by the sight of paddies alternating with forested mountainside. The world about him and the world of his creations were one. Each was of earth and stone, changing over the years, taking shape, and evolving, albeit at a different pace, one measured in hours, the other in millennia. The seasons turned and returned but the craft, and the tradition that upheld it, remained constant.
The stone carver paused, looked up, and cast his eyes over the mountain. It is simple, he said. The work speaks for itself. Then he fell silent and returned to the carving.
When the Cultural Revolution engulfed the country, the stone carver’s work was forced underground. It was condemned as an indulgence. He no longer warranted the stipend he received from the Ministry of Culture. He was directed to teach primary-school children and to work in the farmlands.
As he worked he flexed his fingers and imagined himself back at his table. He saw the hoe as a carving instrument and the field’s boulders as material. H
e saw the muddied farmlands as ink, variable in consistency and texture, ranging from damp earth to liquid. In the ploughed fields, he made out the calligrapher’s brushstrokes, the artistry.
He does not wish to dwell on those times. They have passed, he says. They will return, and they will pass again. Humans will always lose their way, come to their senses, and lose their way again. There will always be tyrants to be overthrown and tyrants plotting to replace them.
As he works, he rarely misses a beat, even as he changes implements, picking them out from the arsenal lined up on the table. Each new line carved, each serpent’s scale chipped, each groove is fine and intricate. He dismisses recent history with a wave of his hands. He dwells in a more distant past, shaped by the conventions of his craft and a lineage of antecedents.
This is what he loves speaking of most, the craft. His eyes light up. He pauses to talk of the finer points. The ink stone he is carving, he says, is one of the Four Treasures of the Study. It ranks alongside the writing brush, the inkstick and the parchment. While labouring in the fields, he had imagined the earth as a parchment, and in the summer months, the hardened dirt and rock as the base of an ink stone. The summer showers were flows of ink, filling the furrows.
Each of the Four Treasures is a separate craft, he tells us. The rate of absorption and quality of the paper evolved through experimentation. The inkstick and brush handles were carved in the shapes of lotus leaves, fruit and flowers, fish and animals. The designs were symbolic and an end in themselves, adding to the pleasure of the calligrapher.
To be dedicated to the craft was a form of madness and a retreat from the world. The Tang and Song dynasty poets understood it, he says, and they concluded that there are things that can only be known in silence. Han Shan knew it, as one who had withdrawn from the world. He carved his poems into rock faces.
