by Gavin McCrea
—It would be a relief. You’d be doing me, all of us, a favour. Maybe I don’t exist at all anyway. Maybe I just think I do.
Now, with deliberate slowness, Iris unzipped the front of her boiler suit to reveal her chest.
That was first.
Then Eva raised the gun and aimed it there: at the triangle of stretched skin and protruding bone that met the beginnings of her sister’s breasts.
That was second.
When observing one power meeting another power greater still, the order, as well as the direction, was important to know.
The next day, a photograph of Eva aiming the gun at Iris would appear in the Guardian. The photograph would show Eva standing to the right, black make-up smudged, her arm outstretched, the gun handle held in three fingers, her thumb on the hammer, her index finger on the trigger. Sitting on the floor to the left, about four paces away, would be Iris, her blackface mostly intact, her neck and chest bare, her eyes wide and staring straight into the barrel. In the background, out of focus, would be the auditorium, populated by blurry figures, including a cine-cameramen and a photographer and some police officers. At the edge of the image, behind Iris, Keith would be seen emerging from the wings, running, his knee drawn up to his waist, as if coming off a racing block. The headline above the accompanying article would read:
MAO CULT ASSAULTS WEST END THEATRE
THREE SHOTS FIRED, NINE INJURED
The following year, the same photograph would make it into the World Press Photo Album. It would be printed on page thirty-six, after the images of the Paris protests and the civil war in Nigeria and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and alongside four other pictures from London: one of a children’s march on Downing Street demanding more nursery schools, and three of violent clashes between police and anti-Vietnam protestors on Grosvenor Square. The caption underneath the photograph of Iris and Eva would read:
Mao means murder! A radical theatre collective causes a scene.
It would be Álvaro’s photograph. Because Eva’s thumb would be seen on the hammer of the gun, and because the bodies in the background would have the appearance of being in motion, the image itself would look like one that had been quickly snapped in a moment of high confusion and tension. In fact, the photograph would be one of a series Álvaro would take of the same subject, in the same position, from slightly different angles. This would be possible because Eva would be frozen in that position for a long time, as much as a minute according to some reports. Álvaro had been in the wings, by his own admission high on LSD and unable to do anything productive, but when, in pursuit of a hallucination, he would happen to glance onto the stage, he would see Eva striking and holding that pose, and this would bring him to his senses. He would run on and begin to shoot, taking twelve pictures in all before Eva fired the gun. He would choose to send this particular photograph to the press because it would be the only one containing Keith. The other pictures would feel empty without the Negro. The story of Wherehouse would not be complete without his presence, rushing in. For, by a stroke of bad luck, he would be the one holding the gun when the police arrived, with the result that he would be treated more harshly on arrest than the others and charged with a greater offence.
Álvaro would believe the publication of his photograph signalled the beginning of his career as a press photographer. This would be his launch. His lucky break. A belief which would gain further power when Doris Lever would include the same photograph in her controversial show Johanna’s Got a Gun at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in late sixty-eight. Álvaro would go to the opening, have his picture taken beside his own photo on the wall, and think, This is it. The start of something. Except it would turn out to be the end. Although his name would appear beside the photograph on the gallery wall, as well as in the coinciding brochure, the photograph itself would become associated with Doris, as did everything to do with Wherehouse and the assault on the London Carlton. Thanks to Johanna, those places, those events would become hers. Any memory that people had of them would originate in Doris’s presentation of them and become bound up with Doris as an artist. It would be presumed she had orchestrated the entire happening, though she would never actually claim to have done so.
Álvaro would try to capitalise on this bit of exposure by trying to build a name for himself as a photographer of protest. For more than a year afterwards he would attend every demonstration in London, of every size, and every happening, of every kind, and shoot like a madman. None of these pictures would end up being published. He would mount a couple of shows, but these would be minor, attended mostly by relatives and friends, who would be his only clients. Far from the making of an artist, that year would be the destruction of an idealist by his contact with his own limitations, producing little more than frustration and disillusionment, and leading him to question the value of life and in the end to condemn it.
Eva’s marriage to Álvaro the following year, though itself a success in the sense that it would last in time, would be in reality the joining of two failures: two disappointed people in ordinary nine-to-fives, who hated each other for not having succeeded, but who could not have lived with any success enjoyed by the other. More comfortable for them would be to share the conviction that their respective talents had never been recognised. The problem had never been that they lacked ability but would only ever be that the world was shallow and unread and terminally inclined to reward the wrong people for the wrong things. Their mother’s continued celebrity as an actress, and Iris’s lucrative new career as a shop owner — five branches of KYOTO FUTON open throughout the country by the time Thatcher was elected in seventy-nine — would merely be proof to them that success in the modern capitalist system had nothing to do with genius and was built on blind luck alone.
But it was a mistake for Eva — still in the London Carlton, pointing the gun at her sister — to go so far into the future. An actress must always live in the present. She must not foresee what she will do next, or what is going to happen to her. She must not anticipate. Anticipation caused stage fright.
Returning to the here and now, her thoughts came to a sudden halt. The images that had been racing though her head disappeared. Her mind temporarily disconnected from time, and she could see the smallest detail of everything around her.
On one side, the police, in exquisite costuming, mounting the stage.
On the other side, one beat ahead, Keith bursting from the wings.
In the shadows, their mother screaming.
The audience, those remaining, stamping their feet.
A camera flashing.
Her own finger on the trigger.
Iris, with her eyes, urging her on.
Everything was in place. Tinglings rushed up her vagina to her belly to her mouth. She knew where and what she was. There was but one tiny, impossible step she had to take. To take it, she was sure, was the most important thing on earth at that moment. So that she might respect herself, she had to be capable of this. Was there another route out? No, was the answer. She would do it even if she had to repent of it all her life afterwards. To right the wrong, it was necessary to exceed the proper limits. Her future greatness would be characterised by the extreme position she took now, and by the holding of that extremity for the duration of the act. It was immoral, yes, but then all great deeds, those which have remained and not been washed away, were. If the need arose, she would not only kill her sister, but herself as well. This was the conflict of right against right, in which both parties had to be ready to die.
Are you ready? Eva silently asked her sister.
Are you? Iris replied.
Eva felt the hand holding the gun inflate and deflate, as if breathing by and for itself. She saw Iris’s eyes puff out and collapse also, as if they had lives of their own. It was wrong to say an actress found her character within herself, in isolation from others; the truth was, in order to find herself she
had to go out of herself, into others. Eva, seeing her own likeness in the depths of Iris’s consciousness, experienced a moment of panic. To be an actress was to be on trial all the time, and Iris was demanding the verdict. Eva had to act and make an end. Yet the stage fright would only subside once she had forgotten this responsibility.
You’ve brought this on yourself, Eva told her sister.
I’m of no consequence, Iris replied. I’m nothing, except insomuch as I’m a part of you. Do it, so, for yourself.
Film footage exists — it never made it onto the television, but it is there in the BBC archive, available for anyone curious enough to go looking for it — of the moment just before Eva fired the gun. In it, Keith is seen grabbing Eva’s arm and lifting it up so that the gun is pointed above Iris’s head. When the shot is fired, the image cuts away as the cameraman ducks down behind a seat. When it returns, Eva is bent backwards, as if she had just been thrown by an invisible force — the image quality is bad, but the front of her boiler suit looks to be drenched in piss — while Keith wrestles the gun from her hand. Then there is some more confusion, the image swinging left and right. When it settles again, Keith is being pinned to the ground by two police officers, the gun on the floor by his head.
No footage exists that answers the question of Eva’s intentions in the moment she fired. Did she mean to shoot her sister? Or did she deliberately wait until Keith had moved her arm before pulling the trigger?
Ask Eva and she would say it did not matter. Sometimes she lived in a way she did not know why. She just did things and did not give meanings to them.
The play had played her, the happening had happened to her. They had all seen her. They had all watched. What difference does it make? What was important was, life had not been repeated.
THE
CLOSING
Public Security Hospital, Beijing
6 May 1991
My dear Mao,
The month in which I am writing is May. The calendar of my daily conduct that hangs by my cell door, with my name and my so-called crimes printed on it, tells me that this is so. Summer has begun. In the garden the peonies are blooming, soon the lotus will come out and the air will be filled with its rich perfume, and by season’s end I will have lain in prison for fifteen years.
That this time has passed slowly, and that its passing has impinged upon my health, is undeniable, but I have endured it, for I have been sensible with myself and have striven to be occupied. When I wake, often at an uncertain hour, I reach for one of your poems or a passage from your Sayings and read it over until the fearful ghosts which assail me have been driven away. I follow this with some Marx or some Lenin, which forces my thoughts to strenuous exercise, although I must say your writings are more powerful in this regard, a single sentence of yours surpasses a hundred of theirs.
In a place like this it is easy to be on bad terms with one’s body and to allow it to degrade; I am determined to keep a close alliance with it. So as soon as I am out of bed, I spend at least twenty minutes at the sink, bathing my intimate parts and laving my face and gargling my throat. I will not wear dirty clothes, they must be aired and brushed and rubbed of any stains before they are put near me. And excuse what seems vain, but I do not need a special occasion in order to fix my hair and put a dab of perfume on my pulses; the ordinary day is occasion enough.
It is my responsibility, also, to keep the room in order, and I, the seventy-seven-year-old wife of China’s Great Saviour, am not too proud to get down on my knees and wash the floor, as once I did as a girl in the country. When I am satisfied that I have reached all of the corners and that the dust has vanished (there is a daily check), I do an hour of tai chi with the hope that afterwards my bowels will move, though it is common that they defy me. Due to a lack of roughage in my diet, I am often crowded and have to strain; not infrequently I am required to unblock myself using my fingers and some soap.
As a kind of experiment with my suffering, they like to change the times of my meals, shifting them one hour this way or one hour that, or sometimes reversing the order entirely that I should dine at sunrise and breakfast at midnight, thereby preventing me from settling into a healthy human rhythm. It often happens therefore that I am deprived of lunch after my exercise, which is a terrible agony and leaves me no alternative except to lie down and replenish my energies with sleep instead. These forced, unnatural slumbers take away from my rest at night, and, filled as they are with wearisome iterations of my daytime visions, release me into the afternoon feeling heavy and out of humour. A successful evacuation can unburden me some, but I try again only if I am sure because repeated failure is likely to darken my mood further and lead to piles.
In the evenings I make my dolls. My normal output is one doll every three days, or about two per week. I calculate that I have produced over a thousand dolls since my arrest. I would like to think that all of these dolls have been distributed among the working families of Beijing, and that the children have been stirred by finding my initials embroidered on the inside of the little uniforms. But it is also possible that my dolls have been thrown into a warehouse to rot, or burned in pyres, or picked apart and their material given back to me for reassembling.
One never knows with these motherfuckers.
Last year, I took a hiatus from the dolls to write my memoirs. I had become sick of the public infamy, on which they take cruel pleasure in keeping me up to date, and wanted to correct the record once and for all. But when I sat down and looked back on my life, what I saw, it appals me to say, was only a shapeless mass. I found that, whilst I could foretell the future with some accuracy — a feat quite possible when one is informed on enough elements of the capitalist crap-heap which composes the present — the past was maddening to think upon; like a vast shroud, it seemed vague and distant, there was no saying how it really was.
Nevertheless, I was resolute. I decided I would not rest until I had recaptured the truth which I knew was there. My work was intense and orderly. I applied myself and became engrossed. I exerted every nerve in my act of remembering. And in the space of just a couple of weeks I managed to turn out fifty or sixty pages. But then, when I paused to revise, I found I was unhappy with my efforts. I have a passion for things which are done well, and I had to admit that I had failed in my account. To my dismay, I had given myself a life so special as to be unworthy of a Communist. I had depicted my experience as unique and for that reason valueless because it could not be reduced to the common experience of men.
So I destroyed everything. I tore the pages into tiny pieces and flushed them in handfuls down the toilet. They were furious when they discovered I had done this. They, even more than I, had wanted a finished manuscript. A finished manuscript was the solution to a problem that otherwise they did not know how to master. A finished manuscript was bound to contain something that could be twisted into an acknowledgement of guilt. And once they had that — my guilt — they would be able at last to get rid of me.
That I denied to them a licence for my own execution made them seethe with vengeful rage. They stamped and cursed and spat and ordered that I be thrashed with ox-tailed sticks. They came to my cell at all hours and hit me about the head with rolls of fresh paper.
—Come, you witch, they said. Sit and write. You must rid yourself of what is wrong. You must purge yourself of your filth.
And I always did as they said: I purged myself onto their paper and returned it fragrant with my vomit and my shit. Never will they get what they want from me.
This explains, dearest man, why I do not make my calligraphy visible here; why I do not allow the pen to touch the paper but instead draw on the air just above it; why, hovering and dancing, I lay my characters out in secret lines, beginning again at the top of the page once I have reached its end, as the old style dictates. I do not do this for show. I am neither mad nor pretending to be so. My actions are without pretence, conceived to ensu
re that my self-criticisms are not seen by anyone who might misunderstand them or use them against me. Anyone, that is, who is not you.
Please do not be alarmed that as I write I also weep. Keep my tears from concerning you. They are simply what comes when a woman has retreated from the people and the parades and the struggles of high politics, and has come to abide in her inner place, and has realised there that, though it might not appear that way now, she is not destined to be always alone. Soon I will, when I feel able, arrange to be with you in Heaven, where I hope our meeting will be what a meeting between you and me should be, after everything that has taken place. In the latter years there grew between us a wide chasm, and there is a chasm still wider now: that which separates the living from the dead.
There is, of course, no width that cannot be crossed if the will is strong, but first my duty is to ensure that I have been thorough in my analyses and have purified myself in every aspect. I must appear before you clean. For only on a blank sheet free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can you write, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can you paint.
Author’s Note
The Sisters Mao is a work of fiction. As they appear in the novel, Jiang Qing, Li Na, Imelda Marcos, Xiao Dangui, Nancy Wang, and Mao Zedong are in every aspect figments. Unlike the Western style of Forename Surname, Chinese names are styled Surname Forename; I have followed this throughout the novel. In most cases I have used the full names of Chinese characters in accordance with how they would be addressed in China; on a handful of occasions I have diverged from this rule in order to create a specific aesthetic effect. Throughout, I took the liberty of calling Mao Zedong simply Mao, because that is how he is known around the world, but also because I felt the shorter version lent the prose more power.
The East Wind is a composite of ideas associated with several twentieth-century European theatres: Moscow Art Theatre, Berliner Ensemble, Unity Theatre and Theatre Workshop in London, Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, and Theatre Laboratory in Opole, Poland. The Wherehouse collective and Doris’s body art are inspired by various international theatre groups and performance artists working from the sixties onwards, primarily the Living Theatre, Welfare State International, the Theatre of the Oppressed, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, Marina Abramović, Zhuang Huan, and Oleg Kulik. The London Carlton is an imagined blend of West End theatre buildings. The Odéon refers to the theatre of the same name in Paris, though it bears only fictive relation to it. The Compound is a representation of the Zhongnanhai government complex in Beijing; not least because Zhongnanhai is closed to public viewing, its manifestation here is a fabrication.