Hard Like Water

by Yan Lianke

  We came down from the second floor of the guesthouse and proceeded to the large dining room on the eastern side of the guesthouse. When I saw Director Liu, I warmly shook his hand, in the appropriate manner of a newly appointed county head. Hongmei said, “Hello, Director,” in a crisp and precise voice, like the red cherries that at that time had just ripened. However, as Director Liu was shaking my hand, he merely touched my fingertips, and in responding to Hongmei, he merely glanced in her direction.

  I looked at the large dining room with its four tables overflowing with food and wine, and asked, “Has Secretary Guan not arrived yet?”

  Director Liu sat down at one of the tables and replied, “He’s not coming.”

  I experienced a jolt of surprise, and said, “Then … what about the county’s other political leaders …”

  Director Liu picked up his bowl and chopsticks.

  “Let’s eat first. We can discuss things afterward.”

  I began to feel as though a cold wind were blowing, and the ground were shaking beneath my feet. I looked at Hongmei, and saw that she had begun to turn pale. She clearly also felt that Director Liu’s actions and attitude were odd and inauspicious. Given that we had both passed through the cauldron of revolutionary struggle, and that in the course of pursuing revolution we had observed all sorts of trials and hardships, we knew very well that sometimes the revolution can bring success at one moment and failure at the next. We also knew that simply because the revolution was succeeding, that didn’t mean that the struggle had concluded. As long as class differences persist, class struggle will never conclude. The struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—the class struggle between various different political factions and the power struggle and ideological occupation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—are longstanding and circuitous, and sometimes may even change abruptly and become unusually intense. When I saw that Director Liu had already begun eating, I gave Hongmei a look, whereupon we each sat down across from him and began to eat as well.

  The steam from the food on the four tables circulated through the well-lit dining hall. The newborn flies and those that had been roused from their hibernation were brazenly eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves at those other three tables, producing a gray humming sound like the flute melody in the model opera Raid on the White Tiger Regiment. The sunlight was blazing, and it shifted from the table to our faces and bodies, and it felt as though our bodies had been wrapped in an oil-soaked cloth. The director of the guesthouse was waiting outside the dining hall door, unaware of what was happening. Director Liu ate half a bowl of rice but kept tapping his chopsticks against the side of a bowl of fried meat with chili. Hongmei and I both had bowls of rice, but we only held the bowls in front of us without eating from them. When we served ourselves from the serving plates, we took only vegetables and didn’t dare help ourselves to any fish or ribs, stewed chicken or salted duck. Time coagulated at the end of our chopsticks like pig lard. The sound of Director Liu chewing his food resembled dusty tiles falling onto the table. Hongmei kept looking at me, dark clouds hanging like a wet black cloth over her face.

  I held out the rice bowl and said, “Director Liu, what happened?”

  Director Liu looked at me and said, “I should be asking you what happened. I should be asking you.”

  I put my rice bowl on the table and said, “We are both comrades and Party members. We are committed to the revolution, to Chairman Mao, and to the Communist Party. Whatever happened, please tell us directly.”

  Director Liu gazed at me with a befuddled look.

  Hongmei also put down her rice bowl and said, “Director Liu, you are about the same age as our parents and belong to an earlier generation of revolutionaries. Needless to say, you are our political superior. If it’s necessary to criticize anyone, then of course, you should criticize us. But if you don’t say anything, then in the event that we might have done something wrong, we won’t be able to change even if we want to.”

  Director Liu finally put down his bowl, then went over and closed the door to the dining hall and returned to his seat. He wiped his mouth, spit out a grain of rice that had gotten stuck between his teeth, and said, “Little Gao, little Xia.” With a face resembling a stone slab, he continued: “This counts as my formally addressing you and as the Party formally addressing you. You are a couple of revolutionary successors with limitless potential. When Secretary Guan saw your dossiers, he immediately decided he needed to nurture you. And it should be noted that Secretary Guan is someone who will be eventually promoted to a provincial-level position, and who frequently interacts with Party Central Committee officials. However, you haven’t lived up to Secretary Guan’s expectations or the expectations placed on you by the Party organization when it educated and nurtured you. As for what exactly happened, I myself don’t know. However, you made Secretary Guan so angry that his face turned green and he threw down the telephone. The two of you must certainly know very well what it was you did. You simply need to look and see whether or not your loyalty to the organization, to the Party, and to Chairman Mao is genuine. If you confess now, perhaps there’ll still be time to make amends, but if you don’t, then the question of whether you might be promoted to county head or director of the women’s federation will be the least of your worries, because it is likely that all of your political ambitions will be finished.” At this point, Director Liu paused and looked out of the dining hall, then he looked back at us, closed his mouth for a while, and after waiting for a couple of passersby to walk away, he added, in a half-inspiring and half-intimidating manner, “You know even better than I how serious revolution is and how complicated and ruthless class struggle is. But in class struggle, you absolutely mustn’t try to be too clever and you mustn’t crush your own foot with the stone you’re trying to carry. You mustn’t transfer yourself from the revolutionary camp to the anti-revolutionary camp.”

  After saying this, Director Liu picked up his bowl and resumed eating. Acting as though he had just finished doing what he needed to do, he contentedly brought a chicken leg up to his mouth.

  We knew something momentous had taken place, and it must have occurred not long after we saw Secretary Guan—perhaps while we were doing that thing in the guesthouse and making plans for the future. We suspected that it must have involved our underground tunnel and Cheng Qingdong’s death. I looked at Hongmei, whose face was as white as a sheet. Her hands were resting on the edge of the table and were trembling violently, as though someone were holding her wrists and shaking them. I was also alarmed but knew that I was a man and furthermore was the former deputy town mayor, the newly appointed county head, a revolutionary youth, a politician of rare quality, and a soldier who had made it through countless political battlefields. The expression with which Hongmei looked at me was one of a child who has fallen into a river gazing up at her father standing on the bank. I couldn’t let her feel that I was not up to the task of being her husband and a revolutionary or of being a soldier or a politician. She was my flesh and soul, my spirit and my companion, so naturally I couldn’t disappoint her. Therefore, I cleared my throat and gestured for her to remain calm. Even if we found ourselves in prison, we had to have the determination and fortitude, the courage and guts to sit it out.

  I shifted my gaze from Hongmei’s face to Director Liu’s greasy hands and said, “Director Liu, Chairman Mao observed that everything we say and do must be pertinent and well grounded, because only in this way will people be sincerely convinced.”

  Director Liu stopped gnawing on his chicken leg and stared at me coldly. “Little Gao, I’m telling you the truth. I’m not the one you’ve angered, but it’s Secretary Guan from the prefectural Party committee. Moreover, you two are the only ones who know what you did to anger him. After you finish eating, why don’t you return to your rooms and reflect on this, while I go report to Secretary Guan and ask for additional instructions. Perhaps he’ll then be willing to speak to you directly about this matter
.”

  Hongmei and I left the dining hall.

  4. The Special Detention Chamber

  While it took nearly a month for Wang Zhenhai and Zhao Qing to be imprisoned, less than a day elapsed from when Hongmei and I began anticipating being appointed to our new positions to when we found ourselves in the police station’s special detention chamber.

  After lunch, Director Liu came to where Hongmei and I were staying and said only three things, whereupon he took us to the police station to be subjected to a special interrogation.

  He said, “First, given that this afternoon Secretary Guan will go to the provincial seat to attend an urgent meeting, he has decided not to see you again. Second, as to the seriousness of your actions, the two of you must know this better than anyone. When he has time, Secretary Guan wants to come and talk to you himself, and he hopes you won’t refuse to recognize your errors and crash headfirst into the iron wall of the proletarian dictatorship. Third, Secretary Guan says that if he doesn’t have time to come himself, he will send someone he trusts implicitly to speak to you, and he hopes you will not hide or evade anything. If you answer everything honestly, Secretary Guan will forgive you.”

  Director Liu then left the room where I was staying. It should be noted that Director Liu was a good comrade, and when he reached the doorway he turned and said sympathetically, “You are both still young, so don’t try to cover things up. Just say everything that needs to be said. Given that this month someone was appointed to an official position despite having killed more than a dozen people in the name of the revolution, what is there for you to be afraid of?”

  After Director Liu left, four burly uniformed men entered our room and, without saying a word, proceeded to search us from head to toe—even searching Hongmei’s hair and behind her ears. Then they handcuffed us and led us away. At that instant, the corners of Hongmei’s eyes began to tear up, but she bit her lip to prevent herself from crying. Before Director Liu arrived, Hongmei and I had already reached an agreement. I said, “Hongmei, do you have any regrets?” She replied, “As long as you still love me, I don’t regret anything.” I said, “I do have regrets—I regret I didn’t have a chance to formally marry you,” whereupon she burst into tears. She lay on me and cried, and said, “Aijun, for me your love is enough; for me this is worth it. Having what you just said, I know it was definitely worth it to have pursued the revolution with you.” We agreed that no matter what happened, we wouldn’t permit ourselves to cry. We agreed that we wouldn’t allow anyone to treat us—a pair of revolutionaries—as if we were merely made of mud, straw, or paper.

  Heads may roll and blood may flow

  but revolutionary consciousness can never be lost

  Don’t worry that we are wearing chains and shackles

  and that our hands and feet are locked up

  because they will never be able to tie down our lofty ideals and aspirations

  Hatoyama used torture to obtain the code

  my bones are broken and my flesh is flayed, but my will is as strong as steel

  we’ll proceed to the execution ground with elevated spirits and with our heads lifted high

  we see—

  the red flag of revolution fluttering in the wind

  the beacon of struggle has set the fields ablaze

  but as we are waiting, the storm passes and a hundred flowers bloom

  a new village, resembling Chaoyang, illuminates the mortal world

  at that point, throughout China, red flags are everywhere

  when we think of us, we become more confident and more determined to fight

  my contribution to the Party, and her contribution to the People, have been miniscule

  but what concerns us most is revolutionary sentiment, comradely love, and whether our reputation will persist for centuries

  and will be passed down from generation to generation.

  We were placed in handcuffs and blindfolded, just like real prisoners, then we rode in a car for about two hours. When our blindfolds were finally removed, we saw that we had arrived in a special detention chamber inside a prison. This chamber consisted of three rooms and was about the size of the Party committee conference room in Chenggang. The only difference was that the conference room had several windows, which were all large and bright, while this detention chamber had only a single window that was only half as large as a Mao badge. This window was positioned much higher than a person’s head, so even if you were to stand on tiptoes you would reach only the lower edge. Over the window there were steel bars as thick as a finger and as densely woven as a thornbush, and at most you could insert only a fist in the space between them. In sum, the detention chamber originally seemed to have been a granary, built in preparation for the nation’s future anti-imperialist and anti-revisionist struggle.

  What was most distinctive was not that this chamber resembled a granary but rather that—apart from the various corners where spotlights were mounted—the room’s floor, ceiling, and walls were completely covered with a dense patchwork of quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao (more than eighty percent were from Chairman Mao)—including quotations printed in red, yellow, and green characters and written in a combination of imitation Song dynasty script, new Wei dynasty script, new Liu script, and a facsimile of the lively and vigorous characters that Chairman Mao used for his poetry. After our blindfolds were removed (prior to which we hadn’t realized that we had been locked in a chamber), Hongmei and I were both at a loss. We were suffocated by the room’s fiery-red atmosphere. In the center of the ceiling was an enormous reddish-yellow star with five points, from each of which there hung a large lightbulb. Around the lightbulbs were portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and surrounding these portraits was an array of these luminaries’ slogans and quotations, stretching from one end of the ceiling to the other. Meanwhile, each of the room’s four walls was covered in five identical rows of quotations written in yellow characters against a red backdrop, all of which were exactly the same size but with different content. The quotations extended from floor to ceiling, and between those five rows of quotations not even half a brick of the wall was visible. Finally, facing the door, there was a pair of one-meter-tall stools with seats a little smaller than a sheet of notebook paper, while the rest of the room was filled with Chairman Mao busts facing different directions. The person who removed our handcuffs and blindfolds was a young soldier wearing a collar insignia and a cap badge. Holding the handcuffs in his left hand and the blindfolds in his right, he gave us an odd look, then nudged the stools with his foot until they were about a meter apart. Next, and without any hint of class affection, he ordered, “Stand on these, and call us when you’re ready to confess!”

  After a brief hesitation, Hongmei and I stepped onto those stools and then stood as though planted there, a meter above the ground. It was then that we noticed that in the center of each stool, there were three upward-pointing nails that protruded through the seat by more than two centimeters. As a result, we could only stand or squat on the stools, but we couldn’t sit down. I remembered the statement that we wanted to carry out revolutionary humanism, and I wanted to say a few words to that soldier, but I watched as he stooped over and walked away. Before leaving, however, he took an enormous Chairman Mao poster, applied glue to the back, and then pasted it to the ground between our two stools. Next he proceeded to take the Mao busts and place them in the path leading from the stools to the door. He moved dexterously, and as he did so, he kept mumbling to himself, as though reciting a magic formula. By the time he reached the door, he had left four continuous rows of busts that completely blocked the way out.

  It was only at that moment that I realized we were trapped inside this room, which was actually a prison. We had never heard of this kind of detention chamber and had never imagined that there might be something like it in this revolutionary world. With a cold, clattering sound, the soldier shut the steel-rimmed wooden door, whereupon the room imme
diately became dark and silent. We found ourselves completely cut off from the outside world, and although we were now in a revolutionary environment, it was nevertheless a different revolution and a different environment from any we had ever experienced. Hongmei stood on the west-side stool and I stood on the east-side one, and between us there was the enormous Mao poster. In the light of the setting sun shining in through the window, I saw that Hongmei’s face looked calmer now, as though she finally understood everything. She even appeared somewhat heroic. I don’t know whether, when she was riding sitting in that car (perhaps it was a jeep), her tears had trickled out when the car shook, or whether she had maintained her poise, like Li Yuhe being led to the execution ground. As the setting sun shone down on the western mountains, the final rays of light crawled through the observation window into that room full of red slogans and bright images. We could hear the rhythmic footsteps of the sentry stationed outside, and through that small window we could see someone repeatedly peer into the room (they must have erected some sort of platform beneath the window outside). Every time someone peered in, the room instantly grew dark. Therefore, every time the room grew dark, we instantly knew we were being observed. I glanced at the slogans and quotations that were posted around the detention room, and saw they were more or less the same ones I had used during our Chenggang revolution, which virtually everyone knew by heart. The core force leading our cause is the Chinese Communist Party, and the theoretical basis guiding our thought is Marxism-Leninism … Class struggle is easily solved … The route is the headrope of a fishnet, and when it is pulled, its mesh will open … and Study, study, and study some more; advance, advance, and advance some more. However, in the most conspicuous location, at the center of the room, the quotations were more complex, with profound and far-reaching implications and bountiful resonances that were both thought-provoking and terrifying. In the center of the wall in front of us was the phrase Leniency for those who confess, severity for those who resist. Meanwhile, on the wall in front of me there appeared a passage that read: