by Gao Xingjian
"Were those all your paintings?" she asks.
You say you didn't hang other people's paintings in the apartment.
"Why?"
"The apartment was too small."
"Were you an artist as well?" she goes on to ask.
"Not officially," you say. "And, at the time, that was indeed the case."
"I don't understand."
You say, of course not, it's impossible for her to understand. It was China. A German art foundation had invited you to go there to paint, but the Chinese authorities would not agree to it.
"Why?"
You say even for you, it was impossible to know, but at the time you went everywhere trying to find out. Finally, through a friend, you got to the relevant department and found out that the official reason was that you were a writer and not an artist.
"Was that a reason? Why couldn't a writer also be an artist?"
You say it's impossible for her to understand, even if she does know the language. Things in China can't be explained by language alone.
"Then don't try."
She says she remembers that afternoon, the apartment was flooded with sunlight. She was sitting on the sofa examining the paintings and really wanted to buy one of them, but at the time she was a student and couldn't afford it. You said you would give it to her as a gift, but she refused, because it was something you had created. You said you often gave paintings as gifts to friends. Chinese people don't buy paintings, that is, among friends. She said she had only just met you, and couldn't really count as a friend, so it would be embarrassing to accept it. If you had a book of your paintings, you could give her a copy, or she could pay for it. You said paintings like yours couldn't get published in China, but, as she liked your work so much, it was all right to give her one of them. She says the painting is still hanging in her home in Frankfurt. For her, it is a special memory, a dream world, and one doesn't know where one is. It is an image in the mind.
"At the time, why did you insist on giving it to me? Do you remember the painting?" she asks.
You say you don't remember the painting but you remember wanting to paint her, wanting her to be your model. At the time, you had never painted a foreign girl.
"That would have been very dangerous," she says.
"Why?"
"It was nothing for me. I'm saying it would have been dangerous for you. You probably didn't say anything at the time because right then there was knocking at your door. You opened it, and it was someone who had come to check the electricity meter. You gave him a chair and he stood on it to read the meter behind the door, then, after making a note, left. Did you think he had really come to read the meter?"
You don't answer, you can't remember any of this. You say life in China sometimes appears in nightmares and you deliberately try to forget them, but from time to time they charge out of the subconscious.
"Didn't they warn people in advance that they would be coming?"
You say that in China anything is possible.
"I didn't go again because I was afraid of getting you into trouble," she says softly.
"I didn't think…" you say.
You suddenly want to be affectionate, and put your hands on her abundant breasts.
She strokes the back of your hands and says, "You're very caring."
"You too, dear Margarethe." You smile and ask, "Are you leaving tomorrow?"
"Let me think… I could stay longer but I'll have to change my plane ticket to Frankfurt. When do you return to Paris?"
"Next Tuesday. It's a cheap ticket and hard to change, but if I pay extra I can still change it."
"No, at the latest, I'll have to leave by the weekend," she says. "A Chinese delegation will be in Germany for a conference on Monday and I'll be interpreting. I'm not as free as you, I work for a boss."
"Then there are still four days." You count up the days.
"Tomorrow, no, one night has already passed, there are only three days," she says. "I'll phone the boss and ask for leave, change my ticket, then go to my hotel and bring my luggage across."
"What about this boss of yours?"
"He can get lost," she says. "My job here has been completed."
It is already light outside the window, and clouds swirl above the big building with the white pillars opposite. The peak is shrouded in mist and the lush vegetation on the mountain is the color of black jade. It looks like rain.
5
He did not know how he had returned to his home in Beijing. He couldn't find the key in his pocket, couldn't open the door, and was anxious people in the building would recognize him. He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and quickly turned, pretending to be going down. The person coming from the floor above brushed past him: it was Old Liu, the department chief, his boss back when he was working as an editor years ago. Old Liu was unshaven and looked like he did when he was hauled out and denounced during the Cultural Revolution. He had protected this old cadre at the time and Old Liu wouldn't have forgotten this, so he told him that he couldn't find the key to his apartment. Old Liu hesitated, then said, "Your apartment's been reallocated." At this he remembered that his apartment had been confiscated. "Would you be able to find somewhere for me to stay?" he asked. A worried frown appeared on Old Liu's face, but, giving the matter some thought, he said: "It will have to go through the building management committee, it won't be easy. Why did you have to come back?" He said he had purchased a return plane ticket, he hadn't thought… However, he should have. After being overseas for many years, how easily he had forgotten the difficulties he had experienced in China. Someone else was coming down the stairs. Old Liu pretended not to know him and hurried downstairs and out the front door. He quickly followed to avoid anyone else recognizing him, but when he got outside Old Liu had vanished. The sky was filled with flying dust, it seemed to be one of Beijing's early-spring dust storms, but he couldn't be sure if it was spring or autumn. He was wearing a single layer of clothing and felt cold. Suddenly he remembered that Old Liu had jumped out of the office building and had been dead for years. He must quickly escape.
He went to stop a taxi on the street to take him to the airport but realized that the customs officials would immediately see from his documents that he was a public enemy. He was troubled about having become a public enemy and even more troubled that he had no place to stay in this town where he had spent more than half of his life. He arrived at a commune in the suburbs to see if he could rent a room in the village. A peasant with a hoe took him to a shed covered with thin plastic, and pointed his hoe at a row of cement kang inside. The place must have been a cellar for storing cabbages in winter, which they had converted with a layer of cement. Probably there has been some progress, he thought. He had slept on the ground at the reform-through-labor farm in a big communal bed: the ground was spread with straw and people slept one next to the other, each with a forty-centimeter bed space, not as wide as these kang. Here, it was one person to a kang, much larger than the single cement lot in the cemetery where he had buried the ashes of his parents together, so there was nothing for him to complain about. Inside, he found more kang downstairs. If he rented, he would choose a downstairs kang where it was more soundproof. He said his wife liked singing.
Good heaven! There was a woman with him… He woke up. It had been a nightmare.
He had not had that sort of nightmare for a long time, and if he had dreams they didn't have much to do with China. Abroad, he met people from China and they would all tell him to go back and have a look: Beijing has changed a lot, you wouldn't know it, and there are more five-star hotels than in Paris! When people said it was possible to make a fortune in China today, he would ask if they had made a fortune. And if they went on and said that surely he thought about China, he would say both of his parents were dead. What about being homesick? He had already committed such feelings to the grave. He had left the country ten years ago and refused to think about the past. He believed he had broken with it a long time ago.
When he closed his eyes his mind began to roam, and only with his eyes closed did he not feel others watching and observing him. With his eyes closed, there was freedom and he could wander within the female cavern, a wonderful place. He once visited a perfectly preserved limestone cave in the Massif Central of France. The tourists entered one after the other, holding onto the iron rail of their individual cable cars. The huge cavern, illuminated by orange light, had layers of walls with twisting folds and numerous wet, dripping stalactites and stalagmites. This deep fathomless cavity created by nature was like a huge womb. In this dark natural cavern he was minute, like a single sperm, moreover an infertile sperm, roaming about happy and contented; this was a freedom that exists after release from lust.
Before he had sexually awakened, as a child, he would travel on the back of the goose in the children's books his mother had bought for him. Or, like Andersen's homeless waif with a bronze pig, he would mount the bronze pig to roam the noble mansions of Florence at night. But he could still remember that his first experience of female warmth didn't come from his mother but from a servant called Mama Li who used to bathe him. He would splash around naked in the tub, then Mama Li would grab him and carry him against her warm breasts to his bed, scratch him where he itched, and coax him to sleep. This young peasant woman didn't worry about taking a bath and combing her hair in front of him when he was a child. He could still remember her big white breasts hanging like pears, and her oiled, shiny, waist-length black hair. She used a bone comb to smooth out her hair and folded it into a big bun that was tied into a net and then fixed onto her head. At the time, his mother had a hairdresser's perm, and combing it wasn't as much trouble. As a child, the cruelest thing he saw was Mama Li being beaten up. Her husband came to look for her and wanted to drag her off, but she clung desperately to a leg of the table and wouldn't let go. The man grabbed her hair by the bun and banged her head on the floor until blood from her forehead dripped onto the tiles. Even his mother could not stop the man. Only then did he find out that Mama Li had fled from the village because she couldn't endure her husband's bullying. But she wasn't able to buy her freedom even by giving the man her indigo print bag with the silver coins and a silver bracelet in it, all of her wages for several years of work.
Freedom is not a human right conferred by Heaven. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth: it is a capacity and an awareness that needs to be defended. Moreover, even dreams can be assailed by nightmares.
"I warn comrades to note that they want to restore capitalism. I am talking about the Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, high up, and down below, from the Party Center down to provincial cadres!
Where they exist in the Party Center, we must relentlessly drag them out, we must safeguard the purity of the Party and not let the glory of the Party be sullied! Are there any here among you? I would not dare to vouch that there are not. Aha, you thousands gathered at this meeting, are all of you so pure and clean? Are there none groping for fish in muddy waters, colluding with higher ups and jumping down below? They want to confuse the battle lines of our class struggle; I urge all comrades to be on the alert and to sharpen their eyes. All who oppose Chairman Mao, all who oppose the Party Center and all who oppose socialism must be dragged out!"
As the voice of the official on the platform died down, everyone starting shouting slogans:
"Exterminate all Ox Demons and Snake Spirits!"
"I swear to protect Chairman Mao with my life!"
"I swear to protect the Party Center with my life!"
"If the enemy refuses to capitulate, it must be destroyed!"
All around him people took the lead in shouting, and he, too, had to shout out loudly so that he could be heard; he couldn't just make a show by raising his fist. He knew at this meeting that anyone who behaved differently from others would be noticed, and he could sense that he was being observed, arrows were pointing at his back, and he was sweating. He felt for the first time that maybe he was the enemy, and that very likely he, too, would be destroyed.
Maybe he belonged to the class that had to be destroyed. Then what class did his deceased parents belong to? His paternal greatgrandfather wanted to be an official, donated a whole street of properties, but still couldn't manage to buy himself the black silk hat worn by officials. He went berserk, got up one night and torched everything, including the house he had kept to live in. That was during the Qing Dynasty, before his father was born. His maternal grandmother had mortgaged all the property left by his maternal grandfather, and was financially ruined by the time his mother was born. Neither of his parents had been involved in politics. However, his father's younger brother had performed a meritorious deed for the new government by stopping a sum of money at the bank from going to Taiwan, and that was how he had earned the title of Democratic Personage. They were all salaried workers, did not want for food and clothing, and lived comfortably, but they also lived in fear of losing their jobs. They had all welcomed the New China, and believed that the new nation would be better than the old one.
After "liberation," when the great armies of the "Communist bandits"-later called the "Communist Army," later still called the "Liberation Army," and then later officially named the "People's Liberation Army"-entered the city, both his parents felt liberated.
Incessant war, bombing, fleeing as refugees and fear of robbery all seemed to have gone forever. His father did not like the old Nationalist government. His father had been a branch manager in a state-run bank, but in his father's own words, his failure to understand the nepotism and infighting cost him his job. Following that, for a while, he worked as a journalist with a small newspaper, but when it closed down, he could only sell off property in order to survive. He remembered the silver "big heads" in the shoebox under the five-drawer chest getting fewer by the day, and the gold bracelets disappearing from his mother's wrist. This very shoebox under the five-drawer chest had been used to hide a copy of On the New Democracy, printed on the coarse paper used in Mao Zedong's border region. The book had been smuggled into the city by his father's mysterious friend Big Brother Hu. This was the earliest publication he had seen of Mao Zedong's writings, and it was hidden with the silver dollars.
Big Brother Hu was a teacher in a middle school, and whenever he visited, any children were chased off. However, he quietly looked forward to this talk of "liberation" and deliberately went in and out of his parents' room. He heard bits that he understood. The fat postmaster, a landlord, said that the Communist bandits advocated sharing property and sharing wives, eating from one pot of food, and rejecting blood ties. He also said they engaged in rampant killings.
His parents did not believe the postmaster. His father, laughing, said to his mother, "That maternal cousin of yours," that is, her father's maternal cousin, "is a Communist bandit with a pockmarked face, if he's still alive…"
This maternal uncle had joined the underground Party in Shanghai long ago, while at university. Afterward, he left home and went off to Jiangxi province to take part in the revolution. Twenty years later this uncle was still alive and he eventually met him. His pock-marked face was not frightening, and, flushed with alcohol, he looked even more heroic. He had a resounding laugh but was asthmatic and said that during those years when he was a guerrilla fighter he couldn't get tobacco and often dried wild herbs to smoke.
This maternal uncle came into the city with the big army, put notices in the newspapers to look for his family, then, through relatives, found out what had happened to this maternal cousin of his. Their meeting had something theatrical to it. His maternal uncle was worried about their not recognizing him, so he wrote in his letter that he could be identified on the railway platform by a white towel t
ied to the top of a bamboo pole. His soldier aide, a peasant lad from the countryside, was there waving a long bamboo pole over the heads of the thronging crowds. Sweat was pouring off the rim of the lad's army cap, but, regardless of the heat, he kept it strapped on to hide his scabby head.
Like his father, his maternal uncle was fond of drinking. Whenever he came he always brought a bottle of millet liquor and a big lotus-leaf parcel of chicken wings, goose liver, duck gizzards, duck feet, and pork tongue. These savory delicacies filled the whole table. The soldier aide would be sent away and the two men would chat, often until late into the night; his maternal uncle would then be escorted back to the army compound by his aide. This maternal uncle had so many stories to tell-from his early years in an old-style big family on the decline, to his experiences in the rolling battles during the guerrilla war. He would listen even when he couldn't keep his eyes open, and refused to go to bed even after his mother had told him several times.
Those stories came from a world totally alien to the children's stories he had read, and from children's stories he turned to worshipping revolutionary myths. This maternal uncle wanted to encourage him to write, and had him stay in his home for a few months. There were no children's books in the house but there was a set of The Collected Works of Lu Xun. This uncle's method of teaching was to have him read one of Lu Xun's stories during the day and then, after returning home from official duties, he would ask him to talk about it with him. He couldn't understand those old stories; moreover, at the time, he was more interested in catching cicadas in the weeds and rubble by the wall. His maternal uncle returned him to his mother and, with a loud laugh, conceded that he had failed.