Soul Mountain (39 page)

“May I see your documents?” She raises her eyebrows and seems to want to interrogate me.

I take the Writers’ Association membership card in the blue plastic cover from my shirt pocket and show it to her. I know my name is already on documents circulated to various echelons of the central government down to the provincial cities and county towns, and could be seen by the heads of party committees and cultural offices. I also know there are people who like making reports and can use what I say and do to write up reports along the lines of the government documents. Friends who have had such experiences have warned me to avoid such people and so avoid getting into trouble. However, my experience in the Miao stockade has shown that sometimes showing this card comes in handy. Especially when the other party is such a young woman. I’m sure to be looked after.

She actually stares at me to see if I match the photograph on the card.

“You’re a writer?” she asks, her face relaxing.

“I look more like someone hunting for Wild Men,” I say, trying to joke with her.

“I’m from the cultural office,” she explains.

This is lucky. “May I know your name?” I ask her.

She says her name isn’t important. She also says she has read my work and really likes it. Her office has a guest room for cultural cadres from the villages, it’s cheaper than the inns and fairly clean. By now there’s no-one on duty but she can take me straight to the head’s house.

“The head lacks culture.” She’s already starting to look after me. “But he’s a good man,” she adds.

The head, who is short and fat, and getting on in years, first asks for my credentials. He carefully examines my card. The embossed seal on the photograph is virtually impossible to fake and after slowly thinking for a while, he breaks into a smile and hands it back, saying, “Writers and journalists sent by the higher authorities are usually received by the county committee office and the county propaganda department, otherwise, the director of the county cultural bureau receives them.”

I know that to be head of a cultural office is a sinecure. Cadres appointed to this position are like old people with no-one to look after them being sent to a home for the aged. Even if he has seen the classified documents, his memory isn’t necessarily very good. It is my good fortune to encounter such a kindly old man, even if he does lack culture, so I hasten to say, “I am a minor writer, there’s no need to trouble so many people.”

“Our cultural office here only has some local amateur activities for spreading popular culture,” he explains, “for example, going to the villages to collect folk songs . . . ”

I interrupt him to say, “Folk songs are what interest me most, that’s the sort of material I am collecting.”

“Isn’t the upstairs guest room at the office vacant right now?” she reminds him at precisely the right moment, glancing at me with her intelligent eyes.

“It’s very basic. There’s no dining room and you’ll have to go out to eat,” he says.

“That actually suits me better, I also want to travel to surrounding villages,” I say.

“Well, if you are prepared to make the best of it,” he concludes politely.

So I take up lodgings at the cultural office building, and she takes me upstairs and opens the door of the guest room by the side of the stairs. After I put down my bags she says her room is at the end of the corridor and invites me in.

It is a small room smelling of powder and lipstick. On the bookshelf by the window is a round mirror and a large number of bottles and jars, the toiletries which these days are necessities even for county town girls. The walls are covered with posters of, I presume, her favourite movie stars. One is a stage photo cut from a pictorial of a barefoot actress clad in transparent silk performing an Indian dance. A panda with black and white silk fur is sitting on the neatly folded bedding inside the mosquito net: this is very fashionable at present. Only the delicate wooden bucket in the corner of the room, shiny red with the original lacquer, retains anything of the unique character of the town. I have been travelling around in the mountains for several months with village cadres and peasants, sleeping on straw mats, using coarse language and drinking vitriolic liquor, and on entering this bright room smelling of powder and lipstick, I immediately feel lightheaded.

“I’ve probably got lice,” I say apologetically.

She doesn’t believe me, laughs, and says, “Have a wash. I filled the thermos flasks during the day so there’s still hot water, you can wash in this room, you’ll find everything here.”

“That’s putting you to too much trouble,” I say. “I’ll go back to my room, but can I borrow a tub?”

“What does it matter? There’s cold water in the bucket.” As she says this, she pulls a red lacquered tub from under the bed and fetches some soap and towels. “It’s all right, I’ll go to the office and read for a while. The archive room is next door, further on is the office, and your room is at the very end.”

“What archives do you have here?” I have to find something to say.

“I don’t really know. Do you want to have a look? I’ve got a key.”

“Of course, that’d be great!”

She says a reading room with books and periodicals is downstairs and there’s a recreational room which she can show me later on.

After a wash I feel much better, although the scent of her soap clings to me. She comes back and makes me a cup of tea. Sitting ensconced in her room I no longer want to look at any archives.

I ask what sort of work she does here. She says she’s a graduate of the local teachers’ college and studied music and dance. The old woman in charge of the library fell ill so she has to look after the reading room and deal with lending out books. She’s been working here for almost a year and, she says, she is almost twenty-one.

“Can you sing the local folk songs?” I ask.

“It would be too embarrassing,” she says.

“Are there any of the old singers of folk songs here?” I ask, changing the topic.

“Of course. There’s an old man in a small town forty
li
from here who can sing lots of them.”

“Would I be able to see him?”

“If you take the morning bus you can get back the same day. He lives in Liupu, a town famous for its songs in this county.”

However, she says, unfortunately she can’t take me. She doesn’t think the head of the cultural office will let her go because there’s no-one to go on duty for her, too bad it’s not a Sunday. Still, she can make a phone call, her home is in the town; she can call the village authorities, she knows them all well, and get them to tell the old singer to wait at home for me. The bus back is at four o’clock, she wants me to come back to her place for dinner. She says she has to cook for herself, anyway.

Afterwards she goes on to talk about a dressmaker in the town, the older sister of a girl in her class at primary school. She is really good looking, exceptionally beautiful and with such fair skin, like a jade carving. If you see her, for sure–

“For sure?”

She says she’s joking, she says the woman has a dressmaker’s shop in a small street in Liupu, she works there herself and if you go along the street you’re sure to see her. But everyone says she has leprosy. “It’s a terrible tragedy and as a result no-one dares to marry her,” she says.

“If she really has leprosy she has to be isolated,” I say.

“People are deliberately maligning her,” she says. “Anyway, I don’t believe it’s true.”

“But that doesn’t stop her from going to a hospital for tests and getting a medical certificate,” I suggest.

“Nothing in her favour will work, people are bent on vilifying her, they’re really mean. What good would a certificate do?”

She also says there’s a cousin she gets on well with. She was married off to someone in the tax office and got beaten black and blue all over.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because on the wedding night her husband discovered she wasn’t a virgin! People here are rough and mean, not like you people in the big cities.”

“Have you ever been in love?” I venture to ask.

“There was a student at the teachers’ college, we got on really well and after graduating we continued on corresponding. But not long ago he quite unexpectedly got married. Of course he and I didn’t have a relationship, we were very fond of one another but didn’t ever get around to talking about it. However when I got his letter saying he had married I cried. Don’t you want to listen?”

“Of course I do,” I say, “but it’ll be hard writing it into the novel.”

“I didn’t give you permission to write about it. But you novelists can make up anything.”

“Only if one wants to.”

“It’s really sad about her,” she sighs. But it’s not clear whether she’s sighing about the dressmaker in the town or about her young cousin.

“Yes.” I must show I’m sympathetic.

“How many days do you plan to stay?” she asks.

“One or two, just to have a bit of a rest before going on.”

“Do you still have lots of places to go to?”

“There are lots of places I haven’t been to.”

“I wouldn’t be able to visit the places you’ve been to in a lifetime.”

“Don’t you get opportunities to travel on official business? You can also take leave and go travelling on your own.”

“I want to go to Shanghai and Beijing to have a look around. If I look you up, will you still know me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“By that time you will have long forgotten me.”

“From what you say, you don’t think much of me.”

“I’m being realistic, you must know lots of people.”

“I come in contact with lots of people in my work, but there aren’t many who are nice.”

“You writers are really good at talking. Can’t you stay a few days more? Liupu isn’t the only place in the county with folk songs.”

“Of course,” I say.

I am besieged by her naïve warmth, and I sense that she is spreading a net over me. That I am thinking about her like this instantly makes me feel unkind.

“Are you feeling tired?”

“A little.” I think I should leave her room and try to find out what time the bus departs for Liupu in the morning.

I didn’t think I would let things happen just as she had arranged. Without having a nap and without washing my dirty clothes, I get up early, go to Liupu, rush about all day, and can’t wait to get back to see her again. When I return at dusk, she has food arranged on the table. The kerosene stove is on and a small pot of soup is gently simmering. Seeing she has prepared so many dishes I say I’ll go and buy some liquor.

“I’ve got some here,” she says.

“Do you also drink?” I ask.

“I can only drink a little.”

I open the parcel of salted pork and roast goose wrapped in lotus leaves I bought in the shop opposite the bus stop. Here in this town they still wrap salted meat in lotus leaves. I remember when I was a child, food stalls always wrapped meat in this manner which gives it a unique and clean aroma. The creaking floorboards, the sense of seclusion created by the mosquito net and the charming little red wooden bucket shiny with the original lacquer in the corner all make me feel as if I have returned to my childhood.

“Did you see the old man?” she asks, pouring what turns out to be very fine unblended liquor.

“Yes,” I reply, lying.

“Did he sing?”

“Yes,” I say, lying again.

“Did he also sing those songs?”

“What songs?”

“He didn’t sing them for you? Oh, he won’t sing them for strangers.”

“Are you talking about ribald love songs?”

She gives an embarrassed laugh. “If there are women there, he won’t sing them either,” she explains.

“It depends on who it is, if it’s amongst old friends, when women are there he sings with greater gusto but he won’t have young girls present, this I know,” I say.

“Did you get some useful material?” She changes the topic. “After you left I phoned the town and asked the county authorities to tell the singer that a writer from Beijing was coming especially to interview him. What? Didn’t they notify him?”

“He was away on business, I saw his wife.”

“Then you wasted your time making the trip!”

“It wasn’t a waste of time, I spent most of the day sitting in a tea house and actually learnt a lot, I didn’t know these tea houses still existed, the upstairs and downstairs were crowded with peasants there for the market.”

“I seldom go to such places.”

“It was really interesting, people were doing business deals or just chatting, it was very lively. I talked with them about all sorts of things. This is life, too.”

“You writers are odd.”

“I met all sorts of people, people in all lines of work. Someone even asked if I could buy him a motor vehicle. I asked what sort he wanted, a Liberation sedan or a two-and-a-half ton truck.”

At this she breaks into laughter.

“Some people are really making fortunes, one peasant was doing deals starting off with ten thousand. I also saw a man who kept insects, he had a large number of jars of them. The price for one centipede was at least five cents, so if he sold ten thousand centipedes –”

“Stop talking about centipedes, I’m scared of them!”