by Gao Xingjian
"Do you really have to leave tomorrow? Can't you stay one more day?" you ask.
"I'm not as free as you are."
The wind blows spray into your faces. Once again you confront a farewell, maybe this is an important moment for you. It seems that your relationship should not come to an end just like that, but you do not want to make promises, and simply say, "Freedom is in one's own hands."
"It's easy for you to say that, but, unlike you, I have a boss." She has turned cold again, like the sea wind. Above the sea is pitch-black darkness, the specks of bright light on the island have vanished.
"Talk about something interesting." Sensing she has upset you, she adds, "You talk and I'll listen."
"What shall I talk about, the March wind?" You talk nonsense and restore a nonchalance to your voice.
You sense her shrugging her shoulders, and she says it's cold. The two of you go back into the cabin. She says she's tired, and you look at your watch; there is still half an hour before reaching Hong Kong Island. You say she can lean on your shoulder and have a nap. You are also overcome by weariness.
13
March wind. Why March? And why wind? In March, on the North China plains, it is still very cold. Endless stretches of muddy marshlands and alkaline flats on the ancient riverbed of the Yellow River have been reclaimed for farmland by reform-through-labor prisoners. If there was no drought, the millet sown in winter would result in a harvest of the same amount of seed after the beginning of spring. In accordance with the newly promulgated highest instructions of the highest leadership, these prison farms were converted into May Seventh Cadre Schools, and the original prisoners and military police were sent to the desolate uninhabited highlands of Qinghai province. Hence the farms came to be farmed by purged bureaucrats and workers from the Red Capital.
"The May Seventh Cadre School is not a haven from the winds of class struggle!" The army officer from Beijing had come to convey this instruction. This time it was a purge of the May Sixteenth counterrevolutionary group that had infiltrated every nook and cranny night down to mass organizations. Anyone who was investigated would instantly be considered a practicing counterrevolutionary. The very first time he was confronted, soon after the initial period of the movement to sweep away Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, he was so frightened that he made a confession on the spot. But now he had become a fox and was capable of biting back. He, too, could bare his sharp fangs and put on a mean pose. He was not going to wait for a pack of hunting dogs to pounce on him. Life, if this could be called life, had thus taught him to be an animal. At most, he was a fox surrounded by hunters, and, if he made a false move, he would be torn to shreds.
After several years of chaotic warfare over what was right one day and wrong the next, a whole series of crimes could be listed for anyone who had to be purged. As soon as a person was investigated, problems were sure to be found, and if a person had problems he would be declared the enemy. This was known as fighting to the death in the class struggle. As the army officer had named him as the main target of investigation, all that remained was for the masses to get fired up so that they would direct their fire at him. He was fully aware of this process and, before the masses were fired up, he had to bide his time.
Right up to the day before the commanding officer announced that he was to be investigated, the masses were still laughing with him. The masses lived with him and, in the same dining hall, drank the same corn gruel and ate the same unleavened mixed-grain buns with him. They slept together on the cement floor of the granary on a mattress padded with straw. The row upon row of communal mattresses were forty centimeters in width per person-no more, no less-measured with a tape measure, whether one was a high-ranking cadre or an odd-job worker, fat or thin, old or sick. However, the men and the women were separated. Husbands and wives without young children to take care of couldn't stay in the same place. Everything was organized in military formation-squad, platoon, company, battalion-and everyone came under the leadership of the commanding officer. At six o'clock in the morning, the bugle call got people up, and they had twenty minutes to brush their teeth and have a wash. They then stood before the portrait of the Great Leader on the wall to seek "morning instructions," sang songs from Mao's Sayings and, holding high the little red book, shouted out "long live" three times before going to the dining room to drink gruel. Assembly followed, and Mao's Selected Works were recited for half an hour before people shouldered their hoes and pickaxes to work on the land. Everyone had the same fate. What was the point of all this endless fighting?
The day he was taken off work to write a confession, it was as if he had the plague and everyone was afraid of catching it. No one dared to talk to him. He didn't know what they were investigating, so when he saw a close friend heading for the mud-walled lavatory, he followed him in, undid his trousers and, pretending to urinate, said in a low voice: "Why are they investigating me?"
The friend gave a dry cough and, putting down his head as if he were totally engrossed in shitting, didn't look up. There was nothing for him to do but leave. It turned out that even when he went to the lavatory he was being spied on. The joker who had received the letter to implement the investigation on him was outside the mud wall, pretending to be deep in thought.
A meeting to "help" him was held on the cement drying ground. To help was to use mass pressure to force a person to admit to mistakes, and mistakes were the same as crimes. The masses were like a pack of dogs slinking off to bite as the whip directed, thereby ensuring that they themselves would not be lashed. He was familiar with this infallible key to mobilizing the masses.
The scheduled speeches became more intense and vicious. Each speech was prefaced by quoting from the little red book that was used as a cross-reference for a person's words and actions. He put his notebook on the table and made it clear he was taking notes. This was the signal he wanted to give: he had taken a stance, and he was recording everything. When the day came and things changed, he was not going to forgive anyone. The past years of constantly changing political movements had turned people into revolutionary gamblers and scoundrels. The winner was a hero and the loser was the enemy.
He took notes rapidly and tried not to miss a single sentence. He made it no secret that, right then and there, he was hoping for the day when he would seek a tooth for a tooth. That bald-headed, prematurely senile Tang so-and-so was making a speech, getting himself more and more excited by quoting venerable Mao's exhortations to fight against the enemy. He put down his pen and looked up to glare at this joker. Tang's hand, clutching his little red book, started shaking, probably a habit he couldn't control, and getting more and more flustered, sprayed spittle as he spoke. In fact, Tang's behavior came from fear. With his landlord family background, he could not join any of the people's organizations, and he was merely taking the opportunity to put on an act to score some good points for himself.
He had no choice but to pick on a weakling like this, someone who was terrified and just trying to survive. He swore, put the cap back on his pen, announced he was not taking part in this sort of meeting until his problem was clarified, and forthwith left. Apart from the few company and platoon cadres dispatched by the army officer, most of the hundred or so present were from his old rebel faction and, for the time being, the atmosphere was not right for launching a criticism against him. He had risked taking a stance to allow his faction to steady itself, but, of course, he knew this would not be able to stop him from being charged with a raft of crimes. He had to flee the cadre school before the net closed around him.
At dusk, he went off on his own to a distant village, leaving the precincts of the cadre school within that endless long line of cement posts tied with barbed wire.
Alongside the village was a kiln for slaking lime. He approached the kiln where he saw some peasants douse kerosene on the stack of coal inside and light it. Soon thick smoke was billowing out. They sealed up the opening of the kiln, let off a string of crackers, and left.
He hung around for a while and saw that no one had followed him from the cadre school.
It was gradually getting late, the sun was a ball of orange, and the rows of huts on the farm had already become blurred. He walked toward the setting sun, passed ridges of corn fields that had not yet started to turn green again, and kept going. Some sparse, withered plants grew on the white saline land, and the soil underfoot became loose and soft. Before him were stretches of swamp. Wild geese called in the limp, yellow reeds as the sun turned crimson to set somewhere further off along this ancient watercourse of the Yellow River. In the darkening mist, it was all mud underfoot, and there was nowhere he could sit down. He lit a cigarette and thought about where he could seek refuge.
His feet were sinking into the mud. He had smoked one cigarette. His only option was to have a peasant family take him in. It would mean revoking his city residential permit and having to live the rest of his life as a peasant, and this had to be done before he was declared the enemy. But he did not know anyone living in any village. He thought hard, and suddenly remembered that his classmate at middle school, the orphan Rong, had been among the first batch of urban educated youth to go off to "establish new socialist villages" ten years earlier. Afterward, Rong had settled in a small county town in the mountains. Through this classmate, maybe he would be able to find some place to go.
When he got back to the dormitory, everyone was busy having a wash and getting ready for bed. The old and the weak were worn out and were already lying down. Without bothering to go to the well to fetch water for a wash, he crawled into bed. There was no time to waste. That night he would have to go to the county town to send a telegram to Rong. It was forty kilometers there and back, and it would be impossible to get back before dawn. He would first have to sneak off to a village outside the farm to borrow a bicycle from Huang, a cadre who worked in his platoon. Workers such as Huang, with elderly relatives and children, were settled in the homes of peasants in nearby villages.
After the last person lay down and the lights went out, he waited until there was a rhythmic sound of snoring. In the dark, the old cadre next to him tossed and turned, making the chaff mattress rustle; probably he could not get warm enough and couldn't fall asleep. He quietly told the old man he had diarrhea and was going to the lavatory. The underlying message was that should the night warden ask where he was, that was how to get rid of the man. He didn't think the old man would betray him: prior to the announcement that he was to be investigated, he was the leader of his work squad and he always gave the old man the lightest chores. He had the old man repairing loose hoes and guarding the drying square to make sure neighboring peasants didn't come with a sack to casually fill it with grain, then run off. The old man was a revolutionary from the Yan'an period and had a doctor's certificate for high blood pressure. However, when his faction was targeted in the movement, his military credentials weren't recognized and he, too, was sent here to the cadre school.
Dogs were barking everywhere in the village. Huang opened the door with his padded jacket slung over his shoulders. His wife was on the earthen kang under the bedcovers, and his little girl, awakened by the knocking, was crying. He hastily explained his desperate predicament and promised to get the bicycle back before daybreak. He said that he definitely would not implicate them.
Rain had not fallen for a long time on the dirt road into the county town. It was thick with dust and so uneven that the bicycle was shaking all the time. A wind started up, blowing dust and grit right into his face. He was choking and could hardly breathe-oh, the wind and grit that March night in early spring…
While at middle school, he and Rong, this classmate from whom he was seeking help, used to discuss the meaning of life together. This began with a bottle of ink. Rong had been taken in by an elderly widow without any children, and lived nearby. So, after school, Rong often came over to his place and they would do their homework, then listen to music. Rong played the two-stringed erhu well, and was crazy about the violin, but there was no question of his buying one. Rong could not even afford to buy one of the very cheap tickets for special student movies during the summer holiday break. He once bought an extra ticket for Rong, but Rong kept making excuses. He couldn't understand, but when he said the ticket would be wasted, Rong finally explained that if he saw one he would want to see another, and he would become addicted. However, Rong did not refuse to come to his house to play his violin.
One day, after finishing their homework, they listened to a record. It was Tchaikovsky's Violin Quartet in G Major, and Rong was enraptured. He remembered clearly that they were silent for a long while. Suddenly, he said he wanted Rong to know that the ink in the bottle on the table was not blue. Rong said, to be more accurate, it was ink-blue. But, he argued with Rong, when people saw this color and said it was blue or ink-blue, it established an agreement or a convention that gave it a common name, but, in fact, the color seen by each person was not necessarily the same. Rong disagreed, saying that however either one of them saw it, the color didn't change. The color, of course, did not change, but whether or not the color seen in the eyes of each person was the same, no one could know. Rong said there had to be an explanation. What was communicated was simply the term "blue," or "ink-blue," and, in fact, the visual perception conveyed by the same word was different. Rong asked what was the color of the ink in the bottle? He said who knows? Rong was silent for a while and then said he found it all a bit scary.
The yellow-orange rays of the afternoon sun were shining on the floorboards of the room. Years of washing and scrubbing had made the grain of the wood stand out. Suddenly, he was infected by Rong's terror. With the sun shining on them, even those very real floorboards became odd, and he began to wonder if they were actually so real after all. People could not comprehend the world, and the existence of the world depended on an individual's perception of it. If, when a person died, the world, too, became murky, or perhaps no longer existed, then what definite meaning did being alive have?
Afterward, he went to university while Rong stayed on in the village and worked as a technician in a small hydroelectric plant. They corresponded and continued such discussions for quite some time. This sort of awareness threw into question their entire school education; it was completely at odds with the unwavering certainty of the ideals of serving the people and the construction of a new society. He came to fear that his life was disappearing, it was as if there was no place for his sense of mission or responsibility to life. Now, however, even just being able to stay alive had become a serious problem.
He knocked for more than half an hour on the door of the county post office, and even knocked on all the windows facing the street. Finally, lights came on, and someone opened the door. He explained that he was from the cadre school and had to send an official telegram. Writing the message was not easy, and it had to be written in the fancy jargon prescribed for personnel who had been sent to the countryside. Also, he had to get this schoolmate of his, whom he had not contacted for a long time, to understand the gravity of his predicament so that he would speedily find him a commune to settle in and immediately telegraph an official document accepting him as a peasant. He also had to be sure not to arouse the suspicions of the person in the post office sending the telegram.
The road back went by the railway station. A few cheaply built single-story buildings stood alongside the desolate platform, lit by some weak yellowish lights. Two months earlier, the army officer had assigned him and about ten other sturdy youths to go there to meet a large batch of new arrivals from his Beijing workplace. Office staff, laborers, cadres, and their families were all there. No one had the good fortune of being excluded, not even the old, the sick, and the children. It was a special train with many carriages, and the platform was full of offloaded bedding rolls, suitcases, tables and chairs, furniture like wardrobes, and also big earthenware vats for pickling vegetables in brine. They looked like refugees. The army officer called it "war-preparation deployment." There was the
heavy smell of gunpowder in Beijing due to the armed conflicts on the China-Soviet border in Heilongjiang province, and the Number One War Preparation Mobilization Command signed by Deputy Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao had arrived at the cadre school.
In the unloading, a big vat was cracked, and brine seeping out made the whole place stink of rancid fermenting vegetables. Taking advantage of his laborer family background, the old man who used to be gatekeeper in the back courtyard of the workplace building, started to swear loudly. Whom he was swearing at wasn't clear, and no one tried to stop him. Anyway, the man's supply of salted vegetables for a whole winter had been ruined. With their heads pulled into their scarves against the chilly wind, people kept watch on their own little piles of "home" as they sat on bedding rolls or suitcases waiting to be assigned to some villages near the cadre school. Not daring to cry aloud, children with faces red from the cold quietly sobbed by the side of the grown-ups.
Three hundred big carts mobilized from several communes had assembled outside the station, and braying mules, neighing horses, and cracking whips created a greater ruckus than the village market. A small car was stuck among the mules, horses, and carts, and could move neither forward nor backward. Finally, with bright red badges on his collar and cap and his greatcoat draped over his shoulders, Officer Song emerged from the car. He walked to the platform, climbed onto a wooden crate, and started waving his arms about. Officer Song, who was in charge of the cadre school, had an army-bugler background and no significant revolutionary credentials.
While he had played a role in spurring on the troops on frontier battlefields, he couldn't shift these peasants' carts, and the chaos simply got worse.
From noon until dark, cart after cart had finally removed all the people, but the platform was still piled with furniture and crates. He and a few others were told to stay behind and guard these. The others all went into the waiting room to get out of the wind. However, he stacked some crates and wardrobes into a wind shelter, and bought himself a bottle of liquor as well as two steamed buns. The buns were made of a mixture of corn flour and wheat flour and were frozen solid by the cold. In his little corner that he had covered with a sheet of canvas, he gazed at the weak yellowish lights on the platform and thought about finding a wife. With a wife and a child, he would be the same as the others with families and children, and he would be able to get lodgings in a peasant home in one of the villages. He would still be working on the land, but at least he would have a small mud hut and be able to get away from the collective lodgings where people were staring right at one another all the time, and one was afraid of being overheard while having a dream.