One Man's Bible (27 page)
When those who had been exonerated died, their work units had to hold memorial services to offer some sort of commiseration to the families. At the memorial service, the son, who was a writer, of
course, had to say something. Not to do so would have been disrespectful to his deceased father and also to the leadership of the comrades at the workplace, who had arranged the memorial service. He had been pushed to the microphone in the memorial hall and could not refuse before his father’s ashes. He could not say that his father had been a revolutionary, although he had never opposed the revolution, and it was not appropriate to call him a comrade. All he could say was this: “My father was a weak man. May his soul be at peace in Heaven.” That is, if there was a Heaven.
“Haul out before the people that evil scum of the Nationalist Party, the reactionary soldier-hooligan Zhao Baozhong!” the former lieutenant colonel loudly announced into the microphone on the dais. Officer Zhang, head of the Army Control Commission, wearing badges on his collar and cap, sat majestically alongside, showing no signs of emotion.
“Long live Chairman Mao!” The meeting suddenly erupted into a unified shout.
A fat old man in the back row of seats was dragged to his feet by two youths. The old man pulled his arms free and put up one arm to frantically shout, “Long live Chairman—Mao! Chairman—Chairman. . . .”
The old man’s voice was hoarse, but he struggled on. Two retired army personnel came forward. They had learned how to make an arrest in the army: they twisted the man’s arm behind his back and immediately forced him to his knees, so that his shouts were stifled in his throat. Four burly youths then seized the fat old man and proceeded to drag him, but, like a pig refusing to be trussed up for slaughter, he pushed and stamped his feet against the floor as everyone
watched in silence. While the old man was dragged along the passageway from his seat to the dais, a placard strung with barbed wire was forced around his neck, but even with his ears pinned back, he kept trying to shout. His face was swollen and had turned purple, and mucus ran from his eyes and nose. This old worker looked after the book warehouse and was once a soldier who had given his loyalty to the Liberation Army after escaping three times when conscripted by the Nationalists. He was eventually forced to bow his head and kneel on the ground. He was the last of the Ox Demons and Snake Spirits to be dragged out.
“If the enemy refuses to capitulate, it must be destroyed!” This slogan resounded through the meeting hall. However, the old man had capitulated to the Party over thirty years ago.
“Fight resolutely to the end, there’s just one road to death!”
It was also at this venue, four years earlier, that former Party secretary Wu Tao (now among those lined up, head bowed, bent at the waist) had designated this old man to serve as a model for studying Mao’s
Selected Works.
As representative of the working class that had suffered in the past, the old man had railed against his hardships under the old society and sung sweet praises to the new society. The old man also wept and sniveled back then while educating the literary men of the workplace who were not reforming themselves.
“Haul out that dog of a spy Zhang Weiliang who has been communicating with foreign countries!”
Another person was pulled from his seat and dragged before the dais.
“Down with Zhang Weiliang!”
Without being struck, the man collapsed, and, paralyzed with fear, could not stand up. Every person at the meeting kept shouting, for any single person could suddenly become the enemy and could also be struck down.
“Confess all and be treated leniently, resist and be treated harshly!”
These were all Old Man Mao’s illustrious policies.
“Long live—Chairman—Mao!”
At the time, there were so many denunciation meetings and so many slogans to shout, but one had to be careful not to make mistakes when shouting the slogans. The meetings were usually at night, when people were weary and tense. However, making a mistake in shouting a slogan instantly made a person an active counterrevolutionary. Parents had to repeatedly instruct their children not to draw anything carelessly, and not to tear up newspapers. The front page of newspapers always had the Leader’s portrait on it, so it couldn’t get torn, soiled, trodden on, or be hastily grabbed to wipe one’s bottom if one was in a hurry to take a shit. You didn’t have any children, and it was best that people did not. You only had to control your own mouth, ensure that what you said was always perfectly clear. And, especially when shouting slogans, you had to be vigilant and under no circumstances stumble over the words.
In the very early hours of the morning, on his way home, he cycled past the north gate of Zhongnanhai. Going up the white, arched, stone bridge, he held his breath as he glanced down at the mass of shadows cast by the trees in the hazy streetlights inside Zhongnanhai. Then, coming down the other side of the bridge, he released the gears and coasted down as he breathed out. He had managed to get through today. But what would happen tomorrow?
He got up early and went to work. At the bottom of the big workplace building was a corpse. It had been covered with an old straw mat taken from one of the beds in the living quarters of the building security personnel. The foot of the building and the cement ground were splattered with gray-white brain matter and purplish-black blood from the corpse.
“Who is it?”
“Probably someone from the editorial office. . . .”
The head was covered with the mat. Was there a face?
“Which floor was it?”
“Who can tell what window it was?”
Up to a thousand people worked in the building, and there were several hundred windows; it could have been from any of the windows.
“When did it happen?”
“It must have been just before daybreak.”
They couldn’t say that it was late at night after the ferret-out meeting.
“Didn’t anyone hear it?”
“Stop your babbling.”
People paused for a moment but went straight into the building to start work on time. In each of their offices, they looked at the wall with the portrait of the Leader, or else looked at the backs of the heads of the people who had arrived before them. Exactly at eight o’clock, loudspeakers in all the rooms sounded, and the whole building reverberated with the loud singing of “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman.” This big beehive was more disciplined than it used to be.
On his desk was an envelope with his name on it. He gave a start. It had been a long time since he had received any correspondence, and nothing was ever sent to his workplace. He stuffed it into his pocket without reading it, but spent the whole morning trying to work out who had written the letter. Was it from someone who didn’t know his address? The handwriting was unfamiliar, could it be a warning? If someone wanted to expose him, it wasn’t necessary to send him a letter, could it be an anonymous letter of warning? But there was an eighty-
fen
stamp on it, and local postage was only forty
fen
, so it had to be from somewhere farther off. Of course, the eighty-
fen
stamp could be a camouflage. The person must be very kind, maybe it was someone from his own work unit who couldn’t contact him directly and had thought up this way of doing it. He thought of Old Tan from whom he had not heard for a long time. But would Old Tan be allowed to write letters? Maybe it was a trap,
a snare set for him by someone in an opposition faction, and his actions were being observed right then. He felt he was being spied on, for sure he would be on that third list, still without names, that the army officer had spoken about at the meeting of the ferret-out teams. He became disoriented and started wondering if the people walking in the corridor were watching for abnormal behavior in hidden enemies after that big ferret-out meeting. That was exactly what the army officer had ordered at the meeting the previous night to rally people into battle: “Make sweeping accusations, make sweeping exposures, dig out every single one of those active counterrevolutionaries who are still operating!”
He became aware of the window behind him. Suddenly, realizing how someone could jump just like that, he broke into a cold sweat. He struggled to calm down and to look unperturbed. Those in the office, who had not jumped, all looked unperturbed. Surely, they were also pretending? Those who were not able to pretend, lost control, and had jumped out of windows.
He held out until it was time for lunch. Even people more revolutionary than him had to eat, he thought. Instantly, he realized he had just had a reactionary thought. He had to obliterate such reactionary thoughts, and it was not a question of a single sentence. All that accumulated anger in his heart could foment disaster for him. Indeed: “Disaster springs from the mouth.” This famous saying, the epitome of rationality, was the essence of human intelligence in ancient times. What truth do you still want? This truth is absolute, don’t think about anything else! Don’t even try thinking. But you are a spontaneous being, your affliction is precisely that you always want to be the initiator of your actions, and this is at the root of your endless disasters.
All right, now let’s go back to him. That spontaneous being lingered about until everyone had left the office, then went to the lavatory. It was quite normal to relieve oneself before going to eat. He latched the door of the lavatory cubicle and took out the letter. It
turned out that the letter was from Xu Qian. “We of this generation that has been sacrificed do not deserve any other fate. . . .” As soon as his eyes fell on these words, he immediately tore up the letter, but, changing his mind, he put the pieces back into the envelope. He noisily flushed the toilet, inspected the cubicle for any stray pieces of the letter, came out, washed his hands, scrubbed his face with water to steady his nerves, then went to the dining room.
Back in his room at night, he latched the door and pieced together the letter. He read it over and over. It was a voice of grief that spoke of despair, but said nothing of the night they had spent in the little inn, or of what had happened after she was intercepted at the wharf. In the letter, she said that this was her only and last letter to him, and that he would never see her again. It was a suicide letter. “We of this generation that has been sacrificed do not deserve any other fate” was how the letter began. She said she’d been assigned work as a primary-school teacher in some remote place in the big mountains of northern Shanxi province, but had refused to go and would not budge from the hostel in the county town. Before her, an overseas Chinese student had been sent to a school in the big mountains, where she was the only teacher. The woman had taken with her by donkey six boxes of trousseau prepared for her in advance by her parents in Singapore. Within a week, she was dead, and no one was able to give the cause of death. If she went, he would never see her again. Qian was crying for help. He was her last link to a bit of hope. It seemed that her parents and her aunt had not been able to do anything to save her.
In the middle of the night, he rode his bicycle to the post and telecommunications building in Xidan. There was a telephone number printed on the county hostel letterhead, and he asked to make an urgent telephone call. An unfriendly woman’s voice speaking in a drawl asked for the name of the person he wanted. He explained that he was making a long-distance call from Beijing and that he wanted to speak to Xu Qian, the university student waiting to be assigned
work. He was put on hold. The receiver buzzed for a long time before an equally unfriendly voice asked, “Who is it?” He repeated the name of the person he wanted to talk to, and the other party said, “That’s me.” He couldn’t recognize her voice, because that night they spent together, neither dared speak aloud. Hearing this unfamiliar voice, he didn’t know how to respond. The receiver kept giving a hollow buzz, and he mumbled, “It’s good to know you’re alive.” Qian said, “You gave me a terrible fright! I’m in shock from being woken in the middle of the night!” He wanted to say that he loved her, that she must go on living no matter what, but he found it impossible to say all the things he had thought up while he was cycling. The switchboard operator in this small county town would certainly be listening to the urgent long-distance call from Beijing so late at night. The telephone was still making a hollow buzz, and he told her he’d received her letter. The telephone was buzzing again, and he didn’t know what to say. She said coldly, “If you have to, phone during the day.” He said, “I’m sorry, go back to bed.” She hung up.
A young woman is lying on top of you. You’re in bed, not fully awake. She’s giggling and the two of you are messing around. You’re really enjoying yourself and hope you are not dreaming. You’re squashed under her, and, down her open collar, you touch her smooth skin, feel her firm breasts. She doesn’t resist, and goes on having fun with you. You’re delighted by this unexpected encounter, but can’t say her name. You vaguely know it, but are afraid of getting it wrong. You sift through your memories. In such-and-such a situation, there was this girl, you often saw her on your travels but were never able to get close to her. She is now pressing against you and you say you didn’t think you would meet her like this. You’re really so very happy! She says that she is here just to see you. On her way through the city, she heard that you were here for a conference, so she came to see you. You say don’t leave! She says of course not, but she does have to fix up her luggage and go through registration procedures. You don’t immediately make love with her, thinking to yourself there will be plenty of time, she has come from far away specially to see you, so it’s not likely that she will leave right away. You get out of bed and ask where her luggage is. She says over there, in the adjoining room. You turn and see that the two rooms indeed adjoin, in fact there is nothing separating them, and, moreover, the other room has two beds in it. You’re worried someone else will take the room, so you say you will have to quickly get a hotel attendant to get you a double room. But it happens to be the lunch break, so you go to the dining room together to have something to eat. She follows closely, snuggles against you, and says it was very hard, finding you. You keep trying to remember her name, steal glances at her familiar face, but you can’t be sure. She’s more like a woman than a young girl, an older teenager or a young woman, so there shouldn’t be any problem making love with her. Moreover, she has come to see you. She says shouldn’t you first introduce her to the person in charge of the conference? You say you are now a free man and can stay with anyone you want to. You don’t have to get anyone’s approval, and you take her with you to the service desk of the hotel to change to a double room. The man behind the desk hands you a key and a slip of paper. There’s a number on the key tag, and you ask where the room is. The man says he is only in charge of registration, and, to find that out, you would have to phone up, the phone number is on the slip of paper. You ask if you can use the phone on his desk, and he says you will need coins. You can’t find any coins in your pocket, and talk to the man again. Is it all right to call first and pay later? He doesn’t say either yes or no, so you make a call and are told that the room is on the third floor. You get in the elevator, and it takes you to the top floor, and you come out onto a parking lot. The two of you get back into the elevator, go down, but still can’t find the room. You stop a maid with a trolley, who is cleaning rooms, and she tells you to go down one floor. The two of you finally arrive on the ground floor and find an elegant dining room, so you think you may as well eat first. The maître d’ in a tie politely apologizes and says reservations are needed, and that they are fully booked. You tell him you are taking part in the conference, and he says special arrangements have been made for conference participants
in another dining room. You and she get into the elevator again, to look for the room. You scrutinize the number on the key and find something odd about it. The number is 11 GY, and you’ve found rooms with numbers 14, 15, and 16, but there isn’t a number 11. You ask the fat woman sitting on a high stool at the bar by the passageway, thinking she is a hotel guest and will know about the number. The swivel stool spins around as the woman points behind you, saying, right there, it’s that hole! You don’t understand why it’s a hole. Written on the brass plate on the doorframe is number 11 G, the second letter isn’t clear but it could be Y. You part the glass-bead curtain, and inside is a huge row of joined mattresses. You look around the big room. Above, to the right of the joined mattresses, there is yet another layer of bedding, which stretches inside the wall. Access is only by crawling in, but the four double mattresses all have pillows. You think that if you want to make love with her, you will put her luggage in the farthest corner. You come out of the room and think to yourself that somehow you will have to find another room. However, she says she is traveling with another woman and they have to stay together. Luckily, they know people in the city and will be able to find somewhere to stay. But, you say, as she has come to see you . . . She says next time, there will be opportunities. She turns to leave, and you wake up, full of regret. You try to recall the memory, to clutch at some clues, so that you will know how you came to have this dream. You discover you are in a single bed in a small room, and there is a bird chirping outside the window.
For a while, you can’t remember how you came to be sleeping here, your head is throbbing, and you aren’t fully awake. Last night, you drank too much. You haven’t drunk to excess like this for a long time. You drank scotch, five-grain liquor, and red wine, then, to quench your thirst, also beer. A full case of beer had been opened, but some cans are still left. Someone brought the scotch from England, and the five-grain liquor was from China. You remember now: a group of Chinese writers and poets have come for a conference
here, in the southern outskirts of Stockholm, at the international center named after the assassinated Swedish president Olaf Palme.
You open your eyes and sit up. Outside the window is the lake with clouds hanging low over it. Lush shrubs and trees grow on the flat stretches of parkland, and there is only the singing of birds, no one is around, and it’s very peaceful.
You recall the fragrant warmth of the woman in the dream and can’t help feeling disappointed. Why did you have such a dream? It must have been because last night everyone was talking about China again, and you had a lot to drink. China always gives you a headache. But that is the purpose of the conference, to discuss contemporary Chinese literature. The Swedes had sponsored the visit of a group of Chinese writers from China and elsewhere, providing the plane tickets, and food and accommodation for a few days. This was an ideal place for a vacation. There was plenty of beer, but because liquor was heavily taxed, the conference participants brought it along with them. There was heavy drinking until dawn. In July, it was summer, and it was a white night; the sky did not become dark, and at midnight it was like dawn. The other side of the lake was a continuous hazy forest with a streak of bright-red dawn above, the birds and insects were sleeping, but these old friends went on talking loudly on the wooden jetty next to the lakeside sauna hut. They engaged in lofty discussions, and their voices resonated into the distance. Ripples stirred on the mirror-smooth surface, spreading in circles to the middle of the lake and making the weeds and the reflections tremble. And this was not a dream.
One of the friends insisted on talking about a whole lot of bizarre happenings in China that had nothing to do with literature. He said that this person who fed the animals in a zoo went to work early one morning, before they started selling tickets. He had just gone in through the side gate for zoo personnel, when he heard the roaring of the tiger he normally fed. He wondered why it was roaring if it wasn’t feeding time, and went to take a look. The tiger was lying in
the cage in a pool of blood, with its front paws missing. A rescue attempt was made, the wounds bandaged, but the tiger had lost too much blood, and there was no tiger blood for a transfusion, so they couldn’t save it.
“Why had the tiger’s paws been chopped off?” someone asked.
“Surely everyone here has heard stories about Chinese people eating bear paws?”
“But I’ve never heard about tiger paws being eaten.”
“It’s for making tiger-bone liquor, which has been a cure for rheumatism from ancient times! Where else could you hunt for a tiger these days, except at a zoo?”
Everyone broke out laughing and said, “You scoundrel, you’re anti-Chinese right through. You’ve made it all up, haven’t you?”
This friend, however, was quite serious and said he had read it in an official Mainland newspaper. “A friend sent me a newspaper clipping from China, it was just a two-line item. In Sweden, it would have made front-page headlines! And, for sure, the environmentalists would have marched in the streets. Hey, does Sweden have a Green Party?”
You didn’t go to the dining room for breakfast. From your window, you watched the limousines downstairs drive off to take the others sightseeing in Stockholm.
Afterward, you went for a walk along the gravel path around the lake. On the surrounding fields, here and there, stood big, white, plastic bags that probably contained grass fodder. At the edge of the dark-green forest, these white bags looked surreal, and you again seemed to be entering a dream.
As you follow a track into the forest, the light around the lake vanishes, and, deeper into the forest, the trees seem to get taller, the tallest and straightest being the Korean pines. Suddenly, you hear the shouting of children, and you can’t help feeling emotional. It’s as if you have returned to your childhood, even though you know those times no longer exist. You stop to listen, to prove you’re not
hearing things, then hurry on. The track turns, and right ahead, between the trees, is a clearing where two girls are dragging sacks of, most likely, pine cones. The taller of the two is wearing jean shorts, cut off so the frayed edges come above the knee. Farther off, a boy is running about with a butterfly net. The two girls stop from time to time, and, as you don’t want to disturb them, you slow down. The boy is in front, running and shouting. The girls call out to him, but he takes no notice and keeps running, so the girls follow, dragging their sacks. The sound of the children gradually fades into the distance, and, by the time you can no longer see them, the dirt track has started to disappear into the grass, and the place looks quite desolate. You still seem to faintly hear the shouting of the children, and you stop to listen, but it is only the rustle of the waves of pines as the wind passes through the tops of the trees.
You keep trying to recall that dream, to recall the tactile sensation of fondling her smooth firm breasts and to recall that indistinct but familiar face. Instead, you recall another dream you have had. The odd thing is that you have had this dream so many times that it has turned into a memory, so it seems that there really was such a girl. After school, she and her girl classmates were a happy lot and were always together. You seem to have been in the same class, but it was not easy to get on friendly terms with her. Those girls also made friends with boys, in fact, they only made friends with boys, but you could never get into their circle. You then remember a big courtyard complex where you once lived. Your home was in a back courtyard, and it was hard getting there through the front courtyard where a lot of people were living. The girl, it seems, lived in the front courtyard. Just like that, another dream is summoned up. The girl lived in a little dead-end street, an old courtyard complex that was very deep, with one entrance after another. Her family lived in the first courtyard, in the left wing after entering the gate, and a classmate of yours from middle school also lived in that courtyard. You went to see this classmate to see if the girl’s family still lived there, but, when
you got there, you didn’t see your classmate. This summons up other dreams that are more like vague memories, and it’s hard differentiating the dreams from the memories. You recall that when you were four or five years old, during the chaos of war, you and your parents were refugees and had lived in such a big courtyard complex. But you are searching for a big girl with full breasts, and your memories and dreams are all confused.
Your childhood years are dim and hazy, and only some points of light appear before your eyes. How is it possible to retrieve past happenings that have become submerged in what has been forgotten? It’s hard to confirm what gradually appears, and it’s hard to decide in the end whether it is memory or something you have imagined. Moreover, are memories accurate? They are fragmented and jump backward and forward, and, when you try to track them, the flashing points of light become dim and turn into words, but you can only link up a few of them. Can memories be retold? You doubt it, and you also doubt the capacity of language to do this. One retells memories or dreams, because some wonderful things that give you warmth, fragrance, longing, and impulses flash up. But can this be said of words?
You remember clearly that there was such a girl, and that you sat at the same desk, on the same wooden bench, and that she had a fair complexion. He once broke his pencil during a test, and when the girl noticed, she pushed the pencil box full of sharpened pencils she had on the desk to him. From then on, he began to take an interest in the girl, and would look out for her on his way to and from school. He once picked up a perfumed card that had dropped out of her textbook, and, after school, the girl gave it to him. When the boys from the class saw this, they started chanting, “The two of them are in love! The two of them are in love!” It made him blush, and, probably because of that, thereafter, warmth, fragrance, and femininity all came to be associated for him.
You also remember a dream from your teenage years. It was in a
garden with long uncut grass, and among the clumps of grass lay the pure, white, naked body of a woman, a cold statue of carved marble. This was a dream he had after reading Mérimée’s novel
The Venus of Ille.
He slept close to the statue, and how he had sex with it was unclear, but there was a cold puddle around his thighs. It was a winter’s night, and he woke up terrified.
You think about Bergman’s old black-and-white film
Wild Strawberries
, which captures in detail an old man’s anxiety about death; probably you’ve gradually moved into the phase of old age. In another of his films,
Cries and Whispers,
you feel sympathy for the three sisters and their buxom maid, who are all tortured by loneliness, sexual desire, illness, and fear of death. Can literature and art communicate? It is, in fact, pointless discussing this, but there are people who do believe that this is impossible. And can Chinese literature communicate? Communicate with whom, the West? Or communicate with the Chinese on the Mainland, or with the Chinese living abroad? And what is Chinese literature? Does literature have national boundaries? And do Chinese writers belong to a specific location? Do people living on the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese-Americans all count as Chinese people? This, again, brings in politics, so let’s talk just about pure literature. But does pure literature really exist? Then let’s talk about literature. But what is literature? These issues are all of relevance to the conference and are all endlessly contested.