Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  You seem to glide into the air, disintegrate, disperse, lose physical form, then serenely drift into the deep gloomy valley, like a thread of drifting gossamer. This thread of gossamer is you, in an unnamed space. All around is the stench of death, your lungs and bowels are chilled, your body icy cold.

  You fall, scramble to your feet, howl, and start running again. The undergrowth gets thicker and it is harder going on. You plunge into bushes, keep pushing away branches and all this takes more energy than just charging down the mountain. You need to calm down.

  You are utterly exhausted, come to a halt and pant, listening to the lapping of the water. You know you are close to the river-bank, and in the darkness can hear the greyish-white springs gurgling in the riverbed. The churned up beads of water shine like quicksilver. The sound of the water is not uniform, and listening carefully you hear countless droplets cascading down. You have never listened carefully to river water and as you listen you see its image glowing in the darkness.

  You feel you are walking in the river, under your feet are river weeds. You are submerged in the River of Forgetting, in tangled river weeds, and you seem to be anxious. At this moment, however, the despair of not belonging vanishes and your feet simply feel their way along the riverbed. You tread on smooth pebbles and curl your toes tightly around them. It is like sleepwalking in the darkness of the River of Death, it is only where the spray is churned up that there is a dark blue glow tinged with beads of quicksilver. You can’t help being amazed, and it is amazement tinged with joy.

  Afterwards you hear heavy sighing. You think it is the river but gradually you make out that it is not one but several women who have drowned in the river. They are wretched, groaning, and their hair is bedraggled, and one by one they go past, their faces waxen and devoid of colour. There is a girl who killed herself by jumping into the river where the water gurgles in the holes at the roots of the trees, and her hair drifts with the flow of the current. The river threads through the dark forest which blocks out the sun and not a glimmer of sky is visible. The drowned, sighing women drift by but you do not think to rescue them, do not even think to rescue yourself.

  You know you are wandering in the nether world, that life is not within your grasp. You are still breathing because of your bewilderment and life is suspended from one moment to the next of this bewilderment. If your feet slip, if the pebbles under your toes start rolling and in your next step you can’t touch the bottom, you too will drown in the River of Death like the floating corpses, and you will sigh with them. It is as simple as that, so there is no need to be especially cautious and you just keep walking. Silent river, black dead water. The leaves of low-hanging branches sweep the surface and there are lines of currents, like bed sheets which were snatched off by the current as they were being washed in the river, or like the pelts of so many dead wolves.

  There is not a great deal of difference between you and wolves, you have suffered many disasters and you were bitten to death by other wolves. There is no logic to it all and there is no greater equality than in the River of Forgetting – the resting place for humans and wolves is ultimately death.

  This realization brings you joy, you are so happy you want to shout. You shout but there is no sound, the only sound is the gurgling of the water as it strikes the holes at the roots of the trees in the river.

  Where do the holes come from? The watery region is vast and boundless but it is not very deep and there are no banks. There is a saying that the sea of suffering is boundless, you are drifting in this sea of suffering.

  You see a long string of reflections and hear a choir singing a dirge as if it were a hymn. The dirge isn’t sad but is happy. Life is joyous, death is joyous, it is nothing more than your memories. However, there are no choirs singing hymns amongst the images of your remote memories. Listening carefully, you find that the singing is coming from under the moss, thick soft undulating waves of moving moss which cover the earth. You lift it up to have a look and a squirming mass of maggots disperses. This disgusting sight fills you with wonder. You realize that these are maggots feeding off rotting corpses. Your body sooner or later too will be eaten up and this is not a particularly wonderful prospect.

  I have been travelling for several days on this network of waterways with a couple of friends as my guides. We are doing whatever we feel like, walking several tens of li, going some distance by bus, taking a boat ride. It is by chance that we arrive in this town.

  This new friend of mine is a lawyer and knows everything about the local conditions, customs, society and politics. He has his woman friend with him who speaks the gentle Suzhou dialect, and with the two of them as guides I am utterly relaxed touring these riverside towns. I, this drifter, am a celebrity in their eyes and they say that taking this trip with me gives them the chance to be carefree and happy. Each of them has family complications but, in the words of my lawyer friend, humans are basically free-flying birds so what harm is there in seeking some happiness?

  He has only been a lawyer for two years. When this long-forgotten profession was resumed, he passed the entrance exams and quit his government job. He is determined to open his own legal office one day and claims that being in law is like being a writer. It is a profession with freedom. If one wants to defend someone one accepts the case so there is an element of choice. Unfortunately, at the moment he can’t defend me but, he says, when the legal system is stronger and I want to take my case to court I can certainly get him to represent me. I say that my situation doesn’t amount to a court case: no money is involved, I have neither damaged a hair on anyone’s head nor anyone’s reputation, there is no theft or fraud, no drug peddling, and no rape. There is no point going to court and if I did I couldn’t win. He throws up his hands, he knows this and is just saying it anyway.

  “Don’t rashly say you’ll do the impossible,” his woman friend says.

  He looks at her, winks, and turns to ask me, “Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

  “Don’t listen to him, he has lots of girlfriends,” she says.

  “What’s wrong with saying you’re beautiful?”

  She puts out her hand and pretends to hit him.

  They pick a restaurant overlooking the street and treat me to dinner. It is ten o’clock at night when we finish. Four young men turn up, order a big bowl of liquor each and a spread of dishes and it looks as if they intend drinking deep into the night.

  When we come downstairs, some of the shops and eateries on the street are still ablaze with lights and haven’t closed, the bustle of former times has returned to this town. After a full day, at this moment what is urgent is finding a clean hostel, having a wash, brewing a pot of tea, letting the weariness disssipate, relaxing, and having a bit of a chat either sitting up or lying down.

  On the first day we visited a few old communal villages with buildings dating back to the Ming Dynasty, inspecting old opera stages, looking for ancestral temples, taking photos of old memorial archways, reading old inscriptions, visiting old people. We also went inside a number of temples which had been restored or built with funds raised by the villagers and even had our fortunes told while we were there. We spent the night on the outskirts of a small village with a family in a newly-built house. The owner was an old retired soldier who welcomed us as lodgers and even cooked us a meal. He sat and told us about the heroic events which occurred during his participation in the work of bandit extermination, then told us stories about the bandits of earlier times in the area. Afterwards, when he saw that we were tired, he took us upstairs, which wasn’t partitioned, spread out some fresh straw, brought in some bedding, and said if we wanted the lamp to be careful not to cause a fire. We didn’t need the lamp and let him take it downstairs with him, then lay down in the dark. The two of them went on talking as I drifted off to sleep.

  The next night, with the stars overhead, we arrived at a county town. We knocked on the door of a small inn and got them to open up. There was only an old man on duty and no other l
odgers. The doors of several rooms were open and the three of us each chose one. This lawyer friend of mine came to my room to chat and his woman friend said she was scared of staying in the empty room by herself. She picked an empty bed and got under the covers to listen to him and me raving on.

  He had a lot of astonishing tales and they weren’t like the old soldier’s tales which had gone stale and lost their bite. As a lawyer he had access to verbal and written testimonies of cases and had even come in contact with some of the criminals. He livened up the stories as he told them, especially the sex crime cases. His woman friend, curled up like a cat under the quilt, kept interrupting to ask whether it was all true.

  “I’ve personally questioned a number of the criminals. The year before, there was a crackdown on hooligan offenders and one county arrested eight hundred of them. Most were sexually frustrated youths who didn’t deserve to be sentenced and certainly only a very small minority deserved the death sentence. Nevertheless large numbers were executed each time as stipulated in the directives from higher up. Even some of the clearer-thinking cadres in the public security bureau felt bad about it.”

  “Did you defend them?” I asked.

  He sat up and lit a cigarette.

  “Tell the one about them dancing in the nude,” his woman friend prompted him.

  “There’s this granary which used to belong to a production team on the outskirts of town. All the fields have now been divided up and the grain produced is stored in people’s homes, so it was empty and unused. Every Saturday, as soon as it got dark, a big group of youths from the cities and towns would come on their bikes and motorbikes. They would bring along a record player and go inside to dance. They had people guarding the door and the local peasants weren’t allowed in. The granary ventilators were very high so people couldn’t see in from the outside. The villagers were curious and one night some of them brought a ladder and climbed up. It was pitch-black inside. They couldn’t see a thing and could only hear music, so they reported it. The public security came out in force, raided the party and arrested over a hundred. They were all about twenty years of age, the sons and younger brothers of local cadres, young workers, petty merchants, shop assistants and unemployed youths. There were also a few adolescent boys and girls who were still at high school. Afterwards some were sentenced to prison and others to labour camps, quite a few were also executed.”

  “Were they really dancing in the nude?” she asked.

  “Some of them were, most were indulging in minor sexual activities. Of course some inside were having sex. One girl barely twenty years old said she had been penetrated more than two hundred times. She was really wild.”

  “How did she manage to keep count?” It was still her asking.

  “She said afterwards she became numb and simply counted. I have seen her and spoken with her.”

  “Didn’t you ask her why she allowed this to happen?” I asked.

  “She said at the beginning she was curious. Before going to the dance she had not had any sexual experiences but once the floodgates had opened there was no stopping. Those were her own words.”

  “That’s quite true,” she said from under the quilt.

  “What did she look like?” I asked.

  “To look at her, you wouldn’t believe it, she was very ordinary. You would even think her face was rather homely, it was expressionless and had nothing wanton about it. Her head had been shaved and she was dressed in a prison uniform so you couldn’t tell what sort of a figure she had. Anyway, she wasn’t tall and she had a round face. And she didn’t baulk at talking about anything. She talked about whatever you asked her without any emotion.”

  “Of course . . .” she said softly.

  “Afterwards she was executed.”

  All three of us fell silent.

  “What was her crime?” I asked after quite some time.

  “Her crime?” he asked himself. “A hooligan who incited others to crime. She didn’t go on her own but took other girls with her and of course these girls also ended up indulging in these activities.”

  “The point is whether she had lured others into engaging in illicit sexual activities or had been an accomplice in rape,” I said.

  “Strictly speaking, there was no rape. I saw the testimonies. However, as to her enticing others into engaging in illicit sexual activities, that’s hard to say.”

  “Under those circumstances . . . it’s all very hard to say for sure,” she said.

  “What about her motives? Not regarding herself, but for taking other girls along. What made her do this? Had someone asked her to do it or given her money to do it?”

  “I asked her about this. She said she had only been intimate with men she knew and with whom she had eaten and had been drinking. She had never taken anyone’s money. She had a job, it seems, in a pharmacy or was in charge of drugs in some clinic, she was educated . .”

  “This has nothing to do with education. She wasn’t a prostitute, it was just that she had a psychological problem,” she cut in.

  “What psychological problem?” I turned to ask her.

  “Why do you need to ask? You’re a writer. She was dissolute and wanted women around her also to be dissolute.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said.

  “You understand perfectly well,” she retorted. “Everyone has sexual feelings, only she was unlucky. She must have loved some person but couldn’t have him. So she wanted revenge, first on herself . . .”

  “Do you also want revenge?” the lawyer turned to ask her.

  “If I got to that, I’d kill you first!”

  “Are you as violent as that?” he asked.

  “There’s violence in everyone,” I said.

  “The question is whether it is a capital offence,” the lawyer said. “In my view, in principle only murder, arson and drug peddling should be treated as capital offences because these cause the deaths of others.”

  “So you’re saying rape is not a criminal offence?” she got up to ask.

  “I’m not saying rape is not a criminal offence. However soliciting for illicit sexual activities isn’t, because there are two consenting parties.”

  “So do you think that enticing young girls into illicit sexual activities is not an offence?”

  “That depends on how you define a young girl, if it’s an adolescent girl under eighteen years of age.”

  “Do you mean to say that girls under eighteen don’t have sexual feelings?”

  “Legally, there has to be a cut-off point.”

  “I’m not concerned with the law.”

  “But the law is concerned with you.”

  “Why is it concerned with me? I haven’t committed any crimes, it’s you men who are the criminals.”

  The lawyer and I burst out laughing.

  “What are you laughing about?” She was targeting him.

  “You’re worse than the law, are you even concerned about my laughing?” he turned and asked her instead.

  She was unfussed about being only in her underwear and, hands on her hips, she glowered as she asked him, “Then tell the truth, have you ever been with prostitutes? Speak up!”

  “No.”

  “Tell the story about the hot soup noodles! Let him be the judge.”

  “What’s there to tell, it was just a bowl of hot soup noodles.”

  “Heaven only knows!” she yelled.

  “What happened?” I was naturally curious.

  “Money isn’t the only thing prostitutes want, they too are sensitive human beings.”

  “Say whether or not you treated her to hot soup noodles,” she cut in.

  “Yes, but I didn’t sleep with her.”

  She scrunched up her lips.

  He said it was a night when light rain was falling and there were very few people about. He saw a woman standing under a streetlight and went up to tease her. He didn’t think she would really follow him to the dumpling and noodle stall under a big oil-cloth umbrella. She
said she wanted to have a bowl of hot soup noodles. He kept her company and each of them had a bowl, that was all the money he had on him at the time. He said he didn’t sleep with her but he knew she would have gone with him anywhere. He sat with her on some cement pipes for repairing gutters stacked on the side of the road and he put an arm around her as they chatted.

  “Was she young and pretty?” she said giving me a wink.

  “She was about twenty and had an upturned nose.”

  “And were you really so virtuous?”

  “I was frightened she might have been unclean and had some disease.”

  “You men are just like that!” She angrily lay down.

  He said he really felt sorry for the woman, her clothing was thin and wet through. It was raining and quite cold.