One Man's Bible (16 page)
Margarethe, you are calling out to a real woman, this is not just the sound of your inner mind. She has aroused your past, and it stands there before your eyes. She is already fused with your memories, and you can’t help wanting to retrieve both your fresh and almost forgotten memories.
Right now, she is on a plane, and by tomorrow, this week will have passed. And, as she said, she will again be her boss’s lover, and, as she had with you, she will make love with her boss. You have already fallen in love with this sadomasochistic prostitute and can’t help thinking of her, her moistness and smell, which arouse your lust. Was she telling the truth when she said she had been raped at thirteen, or was that a strategy of seduction? Should you just treat her as a slut? Or should you let her accompany you in your thoughts, be a
companion in your heart, so that you can share with her your loneliness and suffering?
Maybe you should make up your mind to write down the memories and experiences she has summoned up, but is it worth doing? You no longer need to waste your life doing such utterly meaningless things, but then, what is meaningful? Is that play of yours, which is banned on the Mainland but has been staged here and due to go on stage again tonight, meaningful? Was it worth the suffering it brought you? If you had not written that play, wouldn’t your life have been much easier? Why, then, do you write?
If it is only through expressing yourself that you exist, then is that the reason for your existence? Does this then mean that you are a book-writing machine, driven by vanity to squander away your life? Perhaps she is right, just sink into carnal lust so that you can savor the pain. Since it is impossible to extricate yourself from it, simply sink into it. What need is there for you to promote morality, and where, in fact, can morality be found? That you are no match for the world and can only take refuge in the written word for a little solace and joy is like Margarethe’s telling you about her suffering in order to exorcise it, even though doing this is unbearable.
You take a hot bath, then a cold shower, and feel refreshed. You must return to reality by going to see the final performance of your play. With the young actors, you will eat, drink, joke, make lofty pronouncements about human beings, then leave them with the perplexities of being human.
It was a tailor-made new society, brand new and shiny, in which everyone was a glorious worker. People were organized into work units so that they could serve the people, even the barefoot peasants who worked in the fields and the bathhouse workers who pared the calluses from people’s feet. Outstanding workers were selected as model workers and commended in the newspapers. There were no idlers, begging and prostitution were banned, and grain was allocated according to the number of mouths to be fed so that not a single bowl of rice would be wasted. The sense of personal gain was eradicated and everyone relied upon a wage or salary. Everything was the shared property of society, including the workers who were rigorously managed so that they would be perfect. There was no escape for the bad, and those not executed were sent to prison or to a farm to be reformed through labor. Red flags fluttered everywhere and, although it was only the first stage, a human ideal of a heavenly kingdom had come into being.
New people were also created. A perfect model, an ordinary soldier called Lei Feng, who grew up as an orphan under the five-star red flag not knowing what it was to be an individual, selflessly saved others and sacrificed his own life. When this hero of few desires first learned to read, he felt boundless gratitude to the Party for being able to read the
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
and to write about it. Lei Feng was willing to be a bright, shiny cog in the machinery of the revolution so that citizens could model themselves on him. And everyone had to do just that. He was dubious about this type of new people, but the confession system at the university required that everyone confess their thoughts to the Party. One’s own thoughts and those of others, including one’s doubts, all had to be reported at special summing-up meetings. He was tricked and frivolously asked if one could be a hero without having to throw oneself on a bag of explosives and getting blown up, and wasn’t the function of the engine more important than that of a cog. This instantly sent his fellow students into an uproar, the women students making the loudest protests. He was criticized, luckily only at a class discussion, so it was not too serious. However, he had been taught a sound lesson: a person had to lie. If one wanted only to tell the truth, then there was no point living. It was fundamentally impossible for a person to be pure, but it was only many years later that he was able to comprehend this. He was able to learn through other people’s and his own experiences, but only after having personally verified the experiences of others and suffering as a consequence.
You now do not need to take part in compulsory study meetings to confess your words and actions, and you no longer have to repent. You also distance yourself from any new myths that are similar to those. However, at that time he was frustrated and needed to talk about how he felt, so he arranged a get-together with some old schoolmates who were in Beijing and studying at university. They met at the Purple Bamboo Courtyard Park in the western suburbs. From different universities, luckily, they were not directly linked in an association, but only did a bit of writing when they felt deeply moved. All of them had written things like poetry, and simply wanted to come out of the intellectual shackles of the campus to
relax. The park had only recently opened to the public and was fairly deserted. A teahouse by the lake sold cakes, but those poor students could not afford to go inside to sit down. However, on the grass in the shade of the trees, farther off, there were some quiet spots without any people. The fresh smell of wheat wafted on the breeze from the fields above the earth embankment, so probably it was May, because the grain was ripe.
Big Head said he wanted to write a play like Mayakovski’s
Bathhouse.
He was nicknamed Big Head, because he had won the first prize in a mathematics competition for all middle-school students in Beijing, and also because the cap he wore in winter was two sizes bigger than that of anyone else. Big Head, fortunately, went back to his mathematics and didn’t write about any bathhouses or mud baths. However, as two of his articles had been published, in English, in an international students’ mathematics journal just before that anticulture Cultural Revolution broke out, he was sent for eight years to herd cattle on a farm. Big Head’s problem was not the result of that get-together in the park but came about after he had graduated. He made a flippant comment in the dormitory of his research institute and was reported by a colleague.
It was the reedy Mandarin Jacket Cheng, who got in trouble on that occasion. His nickname came from middle-school days, when he used to wear his father’s old clothes that were several sizes too big for his skinny body. Without his knowledge, a fellow student read Cheng’s diary and reported it to the secretary of the Communist Youth League. Mandarin Jacket was the only one of their group who had somehow weaseled membership into the League. The diary had a note on their get-together, but had not recorded what they had talked about. Cheng got in trouble because he had written about women in the diary. It was said to have been pornographic and lewd, but it wasn’t clear if the women were figments of his imagination or real. When people from Cheng’s university arrived to question him about Cheng, he broke out in cold sweat.
At the get-together, he had talked about Ehrenburg’s memoirs, Paris at the beginning of the century, and the bar frequented by that group of surrealist poets and artists. He had also talked about Meyerhold, who was shot for his involvement with formalism. What Big Head talked about was even more frightening. They listened with bated breath as he told them about Khrushchev’s secret report on Stalin, which he had read in the English edition of
Moscow News.
At the time, strict controls on foreign-language publications in university libraries were not yet in place. The fourth person at the get-together was studying biology and genetics, and he had raved on about Indian philosophy and said that Tagore’s poetry was like a meeting with immortals. The people who came to question him didn’t ask about any of this. In other words, Mandarin Jacket was indeed a good friend and had not betrayed them. What they asked was whether women students were present and whether he knew anything about Cheng’s off-campus relationships with women. At this he knew they were out of danger. So ended their one and only get-together.
You had been living in Paris for a number of years but had never thought to look for that bar. Once, quite by chance, after dinner at the home of a French writer, you left with a Chinese poet who was also living abroad. It was a lively scene at the Latin Quarter at midnight, and, passing by a bar crowded with people sitting inside and outside the door with a glass panel, you looked up and saw the neon sign la rotonde. It was that bar! The two of you sat down at a small round table that had just been vacated; around you were tourists speaking English or German. On the eve of a new century, the French poets and artists had all gone elsewhere.
All of you refused to take part in any movements, refused to commit to any ideology, and refused to join any groups. Luckily, those of you at the Purple Bamboo Courtyard Park managed to pull the brake in time. No one reported on the others; otherwise, even if you had not been branded counterrevolutionaries, the things you talked about
would have been recorded in your files, and you wouldn’t be here today. Afterward, all of you learned to wear a mask, and either extinguished your voice or else hid it deep at the bottom of your heart.
On waking, a few clouds are slowly drifting in the night sky outside the window, and, for an instant, you don’t know where you are; you are relaxed and lethargic. It has been a long time since your thoughts have meandered like this into the past. You look at your watch and get out of bed. You must get to the theater before the end of the performance, for photo ops with the actors and stagehands, and then go to dinner with them. Parting after the last performance is always somehow sad.
From city to city, country to country, your journey is less secure than a migratory bird’s, you simply enjoy these moments of pleasure. As long as you can fly, you persevere, and if your heart and body die, you will just drop down. You are now an unfettered bird, seeking joy in flight, and no longer need to go looking for suffering.
A private room has been reserved at the restaurant, and the group of thirty or forty clink glasses, laugh, talk, and exchange addresses. But most of you will never meet again, the world is just too big. The sturdy young woman with big eyes who played the female lead wants you to write something for her on a poster, so you write next to her name: “A good woman.”
Her eyes narrow as she wickedly asks, “Good in what way?”
“Good in being free,” you say.
Everyone cheers, so she raises both arms and pirouettes to show off her supple and beautiful figure. Another, a brash guy, asks, “What do you think about marriage?”
You say, “Anyone who hasn’t been married should get married.”
“What about those who’ve been through a marriage?” he goes on to ask.
You can only say, “Then try a second time.”
Everyone claps and cheers. The brash guy does not let up and goes on to ask, “Do you have lots of girlfriends?”
You say, “Love is like sunshine, air, and wine.”
Everyone rushes up to have a drink with you. With young people, there are none of those rules and etiquette, it’s rowdy and a lot of fun.
“Then what about art?” It is the shy voice of a young woman standing a couple of people away from you.
“Art is simply a mode of life.”
You say that you are living at this time and in this instant, and do not seek immortality. Epitaphs are erected for the living and have nothing to do with the dead. You have had a lot to drink, and it doesn’t matter if you rave on. Writing plays is for enjoyment, and when you write them, you enjoy yourself to the full. You say that working with them was a pleasure and thank everyone.
Your associate director is a slim man, cool-headed and experienced, older than the actors. Speaking on their behalf, he says they all really like this play that you had written ten years ago but had not dated. They hope you will return to stage your new plays. You do not want to disappoint them, and say that the world is not big, Hong Kong can be seen at a glance on the map, and there would be opportunities. Of course, you know quite well that once a bird has flown from its cage, it will not want to fly back into it. You think about the parched high plateau of Central France, where you once looked down from the cliff at the little city with its prominent church spire at the foot of the mountain. Some distance from the highway, a Frenchwoman lay on her back sunbathing naked among the bushes. Her voluptuous arms shading her eyes were a dazzling white in the sun, like the rest of her body. The wind brought with it the screeching of eagles and the flapping of their wings as they circled below your feet, halfway down the mountain. French eagles became extinct a long time ago, and these eagles had been purchased in Turkey, then set free here.
You need to distance yourself from suffering, calmly scan those
dim memories, and find in them some bright spots, so that you will be able to investigate the road you have traveled.
They are still young, but do they have to go through your experiences? That is their affair, they have their own fates. You do not take on the sufferings of others, are not the savior of the world, you seek only to save yourself.
You find retelling that period quite difficult, and for you now, he of that time is hard to comprehend. In order to look back, you must explain the vocabulary of those times, restore special meanings to words. For example, the proper noun “Party” was totally different from the word used in the saying “The morally superior person comes together with others but does not form a party.” As a child, he often heard his father proclaim this to assert his own moral superiority, but afterward, his father did not dare say this again. At the mention of the word “Party,” his father turned solemn and reverent, and his hand shook so badly that liquor spilled from the cup he was holding. If he had not been so terrified, he would not have tried to kill himself. Such was the greatness and might of the noun “Party.” The great and mighty nation, moreover, ranked below the Party and, needless to say, the place where persons worked, were paid, and ate meals—the “work unit”—belonged to the Party. Thus, a person’s residential permit, grain allocation, housing, as well as personal freedom, were determined by the Party “work unit.” However, this did not apply to the enemy, and hence the word “comrade” assumed extreme importance, and everyone used all means to ensure that that word would remain attached to his or her name. To fail to do so made one an “Ox Demon and Snake Spirit,” who had to be “purged” from the “work unit” and forced to undertake “reform through labor.”
So, whenever the Party decided to initiate a movement to purify the ranks, the people of every work unit fought with a vengeance. Everyone was afraid of being purged: a person could be classified as “Revolutionary Comrade” (twenty-six grades) or “Ox Demon and Snake Spirit” (divided into five big categories). This classification determined whether one had a city residential permit (for people not required to work in agricultural production and who received fixed monthly coupons to buy goods and grain products), whether one had to undergo reform through labor, or whether one was to live or die. And this classification depended on policies that fluctuated according to the bitter infighting of the twenty or so members of the Party Center (usually the Political Bureau and the Secretariat of the Party Center), on their subsequent transmission, and on internal party documents that were inaccessible to people in general. A person’s fate was thus miraculously determined with ten thousand times greater accuracy than the prophecies of the Bible. Failure to comply with regulations constituted an error if minor, and a crime if major, and this was accordingly recorded in a person’s file.
What was recorded in the file was, of course, not simply a person’s life. Wrong words and actions, general political and moral conduct, a person’s written thought-reports and confessions, as well as the verdicts and judgments of the Party organization of the work unit, were collected together and placed under confidential supervision by special personnel. A person was tracked from one work unit to another but did not need to imagine ever being able to see the file.
Also, for example, the word “study” was not the dictionary definition of acquiring knowledge or the learning of a particular skill. No, it referred solely to the eradication of thinking that failed to conform to what had been stipulated by the Party at a particular
time. Don’t laugh! The word “private” was interpreted as “individual,” and, by extension, could also mean psychological evil that had to be ruthlessly eradicated. Moreover, the May Seventh Cadre Schools were definitely not schools as generally known in past and present times, in China or elsewhere. Application for enrollment was not necessary, and, once assigned, attendance was obligatory. In the cadre school, people supervised one another while undergoing intensive physical labor designed to snuff out thinking and to punish anyone with an education or capable of reflective thinking. The Party only permitted one kind of thinking, that is, the thinking of the Supreme Leader. At the time, it was the same for Party cadres and ordinary public personnel, including their family members. If one was sent to a cadre school, it was impossible to protest. Like the work unit, the cadre school controlled a person’s grain rations, place of residence, and outside travel. There was no possibility of playing truant, like a child, and, furthermore, where could one hide?
All these terms had their own related vocabulary, enough for compiling a dictionary of words and phrases, but you have no intention of exerting yourself compiling such a dictionary just to benefit historical research.
And, on the subject of history, for example, this so-called Cultural Revolution took place just thirty or so years ago, and yet there were numerous revisions prior to the Party Representative Conference official interpretation of 1981. There were considerable changes of course from Mao’s Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party edition to Deng Xiaoping’s Third Plenum of the Party Central Committee edition, but investigating these changes is, at present, prohibited. Also, the various popular revisions of the history of the Cultural Revolution are all different. Is it the history of the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guard Danian, the history of the Cultural Revolution by Big Li of the rebel faction, or the memoirs of the Party secretary Comrade Wu Tao who fell from political power? Or is it the subsequent appeal by the son of Old Liu who was beaten to
death? Or is it the memorial speeches at the ceremony to compensate and exonerate the old commander who starved to death in the political prison he himself had established during the bloody battles? Or is it the history of the suffering of that abstract notion, “the people”? And do “the people” have a history?
During the Cultural Revolution, people were “rebelling,” whereas before that people were “making revolution.” However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, people avoided talking about rebelling, or simply forgot that part of history. Everyone has become a victim of that great catastrophe known as the Cultural Revolution and has forgotten that before disaster fell upon their own heads, they, too, were to some extent the assailants. The history of the Cultural Revolution is thus being continually revised. It is best that you do not try to write a history, but only to look back upon your own experiences.
At the time, he was impulsive and stupid, and the bitterness of having been duped was like swallowing rat poison. If it had been swallowed, then vomiting should have been able to get rid of it. In theory, it was simple, but repeated vomiting still couldn’t completely get rid of it.
Righteous indignation and political gambles, tragedy and farce, heroes and clowns, were created through people being manipulated. Blah! Blah! The high-sounding righteous words, discussion, and vilification, all proclaimed the words of the Party. People lost their own voices, became puppets, and could not escape the big hand behind, which controlled them.
Now, when you hear impassioned speeches, you secretly smile. Slogans calling for revolution and rebellion give you goose bumps, and as soon as heroes or fighters appear, you quickly step aside. All that fervor and righteous indignation should be fed to dogs. You should have fled that arena for baiting animals to tear at one another long ago. It is not for you. Your domain lies only between paper and pen, writing not as a tool in the hands of others, but simply to speak to yourself.
You strive to collect memories. The reason he went crazy at that time was probably because the illusions he believed in had been shattered, and the imaginary world of books had become taboo. Also, he was young, had nowhere to dissipate his energy, and couldn’t find a woman for his body and soul. Sexually frustrated, he simply stirred the water in mud puddles.
The utopia of the new society, like the new people, was a rewriting of a legend. Now, when you hear people lamenting the destruction of their ideals, you think to yourself that it was a good thing they were destroyed. And whenever you hear anyone loudly proclaiming ideals, you think it is some quack peddling dog-skin bandages again. If someone prattles on and tries to convert you, or preaches to you, you quickly say sure, sure, see you some other time, and, with luck, slip away.
You no longer engage in polemics and prefer to go off to have a beer. Life is irrational; so, must a rationale be formulated for human existence before people can be people? No, you simply narrate, use language to reconstruct the he of that time. From this time and this place you return to that time and that place, using your state of mind at this time and this place to tell of him at that time and that place. Probably this is the significance of this investigation of yours.
He originally had no enemies, so why was it necessary to find them? It is only now that you realize that if there still are enemies, they are dead-and-buried shadows left in your heart by Old Man Mao. And you simply have to walk away from them. There is no need to tilt at shadows, to fritter away the little life that you still have.
Now you are without “isms.” A person without “isms” is more like a person. An insect or a plant is without “isms.” You, too, have a life and will no longer be manipulated by any “isms,” and you prefer to be an onlooker living on the fringes of society. Unavoidably, there will be perspectives, views and tendencies, but, finally, no particular “isms.” This is the difference between the you of the present and the he that you are investigating.