The Remote Country of Women
Page 11
Suddenly, she felt her skin had a tinge of smoothness. Opening her eyes, she saw Hedigu was naked, a naked man in her arms. She shoved him aside, only to find that she was naked, too. She did not know how she had gotten naked like that.
When had she taken off her clothes? No, she hadn’t taken 9 1
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them off. Then why weren’t her clothes on her body any
more? Just as Hedigu was embracing her, she woke up.
Amiji Zhima and Geda stood before her. The sun popped
its laughing face through the treetops. Thousands of slanting rays shot between leaves and branches. She was too shy to look at herself, a naked woman in the sunlight. When she realized that she did have her clothes on, she rose to her feet, rubbing her still drowsy eyes. Meanwhile, she found herself before the mountain peaks, still tiny and obscure, like a rat under the cloak of a lotus leaf. In contrast, Amiji Zhima had a tall body, a pair of eyes emitting infinite self-confidence and charm, and two long, springy legs. Even Sunamei was
attracted to her, not to speak of the men. Geda caressed Zhima’s body with eyes of love and warmth. Tidying up her hair from the back, Zhima cast him a languid but bewitching eye. Geda gently held Sunamei with one hand and lifted her onto the white horse.
“You may ride by yourself now. I’ll ride with Zhima on
the other horse.” Thus saying, he jumped on the red horse, bent low, and stretched out his arms to Zhima. Giggling, Zhima sprang into Geda’s arms. Holding her tight, he
tapped the ribs of the horse with his boot heels. The red horse, raising its head, galloped away with a loud neigh.
Holding the reins tightly, Sunamei did not allow the
white horse to run after them. The horse, carrying her like a burden, trotted downhill. She seemed to drop straight from the blue heaven to the grassy earth. The sky above was suddenly overcast. Clenching her teeth, she checked her tears.
She was determined to send her tears back or make them dry in the rims of her eyes. She declared to herself, “Now I am a skirt woman!”
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I gaze at her window. In the past it was pasted
over with black paper; now a cloth curtain with tiny blue flowers hangs there.
Damn my luck! Not until the bus had
arrived at the terminal in town did they take the towel from my mouth, untie the ropes, and push me off the bus. To test my throat, I shouted with all my strength,
“Who are you! How dare you treat me like that? You – ”
I could hear my voice was still loud and clear. Nothing
wrong with my vocal cords. Yet everyone ignored me. Each passenger went his own way; the driver and conductor left after locking the bus, as if I were a mute and my shouts did not exist. How could they treat me this way? But they had.
Could I bite their ears off? I must let them know I was not a madman but a TB sufferer – to be honest, someone imper-sonating a TB sufferer. Of course, I could not reveal the truth. I merely shouted, “Chairman Mao teaches us: ‘Seek truth from the facts.’” Prefacing my remarks with a recitation from the Quotations of Chairman Mao would make me invincible. Otherwise, the masses could ask me, What is
your attitude toward our great leader Chairman Mao? Such a question would strike me dumb. “I have come to town to treat my tuberculosis. How could you have tied me up like a madman? You criminals!” But they ignored me. Only a few
passersby, totally ignorant of my case, stopped to watch me, 9 3
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snickering. They must have thought I was a clown, or else why would I be imploring law and justice in a lawless, god-less state? This train of thought brought a sour smile to my face. Who cared, if my goal of reaching town had been realized? I spit fiercely and then rubbed the saliva into the ground with my feet. My action declared the end of a most humiliating journey. In the end, I had squeezed myself out through the narrow gate.
I gaze at her window. In the past it was pasted over with black paper; now a cloth curtain with tiny blue flowers hangs there.
I remember the first time I went to look for her. I was
standing beneath this same tree and spying at her window from the same angle. Unable to see any light, I could not be sure whether she was in and whether she lived alone or with someone else. Although I was just a country bumpkin, I was smart enough to find her place by the address she had given me and to figure out that the window pasted over with dark paper must be her cocoon. As if floating on the clouds, I climbed upstairs and stood by her door to eavesdrop. Nothing could be heard. My attempt to peep was also doomed:
the keyhole was stuffed. I knocked at the door. After a long moment, the door opened a chink, letting out a slim shaft of light. Although the door was unlocked, it was held by a
chain. Perhaps recognizing me, she unhooked the chain and opened the door wide. I had expected our meeting to be a beautiful scene, as in movies and plays: she would utter cries of surprise, and I would be too thrilled to say a word but would shuffle my feet with lowered head. The reality was entirely different: she showed no surprise, and I didn’t, either. It seemed my arrival fit her expectations perfectly.
Wrinkling her nose, she extended one hand. “Hi, come
on in. Don’t be shy.”
Yielding to her gentle tug, I stepped into her cocoon.
“Take a seat.”
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Where could I possibly sit? There was only a dilapidated iron bed in the middle of the room. A shapeless quilt, which never needed folding, was heaped on the bed. And, she was sitting on that bed, holding a pillow that looked like a gray cat. Looking around, I found the room needed no modifiers.
The classic description, “a home with four bare walls,” was perfect. Seeing my disappointment, she sneered and stood up to drag me over.
“Take a seat. Don’t pretend to be more foolish than
you are.”
I could well imagine how foolish I looked. My last hair-
cut had been done in what was called the toilet-seat style with a pair of rusty scissors by a classmate who knew nothing about haute coiffure. My clothing consisted of a most fashionable threadbare army coat and blue pants too short to cover my bare muddy feet in worn-out liberation shoes.
From my shoulder hung a large, stupid-looking, mud-col-
ored satchel that contained the album wrapped in several layers of old newspapers.
I too sat down on the small iron bed. The bed gave a
shriek – of welcome or of protest? Most likely the latter. She stood up and then sat down next to me. The iron bed gave out a helpless groan. She took out a delicate Yixing teapot from under the bed. She took a sip, wiped it with her hand, and passed it to me. I thirstily sucked down a huge mouthful. From the slurping noise, she knew I had drunk up the whole pot. She grabbed it from me and said, “A bumpkin
indeed! How can you guzzle tea like that?”
In great embarrassment I saw the leftover tea leaves in
the pot. The tea was warm and strong. I asked, “May I have a bowl of cold water?”
“Don’t humiliate me. I have plenty of tea. But the way
you drink shows your lack of culture. You need to become more civilized.” In the little kitchen she put a large handful of tea leaves in a large mug; passing it to me, she said, “Take it and drink to your heart’s content.”
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Holding the hot tea mug, I laughed. But soon I realized
that act 1, which I had performed impromptu, had come to an end. What should I do for the next act? “Tomorrow I’ve got to go to the hospital for an X ray,” I said anxiously. “You know, I’m…not sick at all. The X ray will expose me
instantly. But it’s nice to pl
ay hooky for a change. Even if I have to return tomorrow, this will still have been a rewarding trip.” As I pronounced the phrase rewarding trip, I purposely slowed down its rhythm and polished its tone with tenderness and sad emotion. Like a poor actor, I cast a
slightly flirtatious glance at her. She gently patted me on the back. Shaking me, she said mischievously: “Supreme
command: ‘Since you are here, be at ease.’ No need to worry.
Don’t go to the hospital. I’ll take care of your X ray, your medical report, and all the rest.”
Wow! My eyes grew wide with surprise until they were
larger than those of a cow. Hard to imagine that a little girl, dwelling in her deep bower, could have such power. Seques-tered inside a cocoon, what influence could she possibly exert on the outside world? It was no less severe than our reformatory farm. Between human beings there was only
surveillance, exposure, informing, and slander. Where could one find sympathy or personal friendship? Was one really able to find a friend willing to write a false medical report (the term friend was generally regarded as outdated and reactionary)? You could never seduce old Iron Plum into doing such a thing.
“Don’t you believe me? If not, there’s the door. Bye, bye.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, but I dare not believe you.”
“You dumb country bumpkin. You still believe that
everybody behaves the same as when you were a Red Guard
– when people blindly believed everything they were told and conscientiously did their evil. It’s strange that even today you are still under a deception, failing to see that 9 6
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every member of the central committee has been wearing
two faces since the very first day of the great Cultural Revolution: one for the Red Guards and the masses, the other for their cronies. Please remember, bumpkin, not all shining planets try to reveal themselves. On the contrary, those who shine brightest on others squat in the darkest shadows. The hoi polloi like us, with no luster to decorate us, have to protect ourselves from the strong rays and create a shadow so that we can put our hands behind our backs and get a little warmth. Except for this tiny warmth, what else is left to us?
Never mind. Why should I get sentimental over something
like this? Don’t laugh at me.”
“I feel the same way sometimes. I can suddenly become
sentimental over things that have long bored me to death.
So I’d never laugh at you. What strange creatures human
beings are. Really strange. But… where can I stay for the night?”
“Here, of course.”
As simple as that? Dear heaven! So simple. “Come with
me.” A male and a female living in one cocoon. How could such a complicated matter become so simple? Many sages
and virtuous men in Chinese history had expounded on this topic. One emperor after another had established religion, law, and the courts through senate, ministry, and constitutional congress. Civil courts had sentenced thousands on thousands of sinners, and talented scholars had written
mountains of classics, popular novels, and dramas. Yet steal-ing into her cocoon was unbelievably easy. I’ll bet she didn’t know China could even claim the great sage Confucius, even though the entire nation was consuming tons of paper and ink to criticize him, or perhaps she was not conscious of the fact that she and I belonged to different sexes. I remember once she told me she had read a great many novels and
found that most of them based their romances on a certain ethic. Perhaps she was merely bragging. In fact, she had 9 7
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never read any love stories. I stared at her flabbergasted, and she suddenly spewed the tea out of her mouth with an irrepressible laugh.
“Look at yourself in the mirror. You’re like the farmer
brought before a judge for pulling up railroad spikes to use as weights for his fishing nets.” She read me well enough. I hadn’t read Chekhov’s work to know what kind of appearance the farmer had made before the judge. But I was sure she was not flattering me. “Why don’t you put down your
wretched satchel?”
She snatched it from my shoulder. As she was about to
throw it into the corner, I held her hand. “Don’t break it!”
“What, except for quotations, what else do you have in it?”
“My medical transfer permit – ”
“And half a cold bun.”
“No. A record album.”
“An album? Shajiabang Riverside? The Red Lantern? On the Dock? Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy? ”
“None of those.” I cut her off for fear of hearing the titles of all eight model operas. “Tchaikovsky.”
“Tchaikovsky?” Her eyes lit up. I have never seen the eyes of those who came to an oasis after a long journey in the desert, yet I believed the eyes of the dusty wayfarer would be just like hers at that moment. She patted my cheeks with her soft little hands. “Gorgeous. How wonderful you are!
You can get a Tchaikovsky.” I took the album out of my
satchel and tore away its wrapper. The portrait of Tchaikovsky appeared on its cover, a man with thoughtful, wise eyes and a typically Russian beard.
“Oh!” She felt Tchaikovsky’s face and said affectionately,
“Old Tchai, it’s really you, my old man Tchai.” How could she address Tchaikovsky as “old Tchai,” as if he were an old Chinese man with whom she was acquainted? I was a bit
jealous. How did she get to know him so well? I, a university student, seemed to be less knowledgeable than a junior-high schoolgirl. I had never even heard a note of old Tchai’s 9 8
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compositions. Nevertheless, it was I who had preserved this album from the vandalism that was still going on.
“Superb! How did you keep it till today?”
“I…” I dared not tell her the truth. The truth could be
too true for her. Any image, too true to reality, becomes monstrous. It could reduce my status of being superb to
that of being barbarous. Countless precious albums, tapes, and composition books had been burned to ashes by one
stroke of a match. Yet then I thought I was behaving like Lin Zequ, our national hero who had burned all the opium from foreign ships with such dignity. Now I could give her only an ambiguous answer: “Purely by accident. Pity, it has a crack.”
“Oh.” She seemed to understand my situation and
stopped pursuing the truth. Perhaps she was guessing that the album was associated with personal tragedy and did not wish to awaken my sad memories. This was indeed a grave
mistake. However, the misunderstanding had already
arisen. Let her misjudge me.
Closing her eyes and holding her hands to her chest, she said solemnly, “Let me sit in silence for a while before I listen to it.”
Looking at her uplifted, angelic face, I had no idea what she was thinking. But I could be certain she was trying desperately to lead her soul to tranquility. Gaping like a fool, I gazed at her lips, which turned red from excitement. Had I ever had such pure passions? No. What passion I had once experienced was of another kind, a fervent, hysterical impulse. But, although at that moment she looked like a calm lake on the surface, the depth of her soul held subterra-nean flames. I was amazed that a cracked album could stir such terrific waves in her heart. How could it? But how
were we going to listen to this album? Could it play itself?
Of course not.
As I was puzzling the matter over, she opened her eyes
and said softly, “Come with me.”
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I followed her. She opened a door to another room, a
room filled with worn-out sofas, broken chairs,
old quilts, and other items. It smelled moldy, and each footstep stirred up a cloud of dust. From the dust and broken furniture she pulled out a makeshift ladder, obviously homemade with
poles and sticks, and passed it to me. I shouldered the ladder and hurried away from the dust. She asked me to carry it to the narrow bathroom and place it in the square roof opening made for the convenience of plumbers and electricians. She climbed up the ladder into that hole and dragged out a tran-sistor radio. Passing it to me, she then took out a four-speed phonograph made in Czechoslovakia. So, she had hidden her treasures in the attic. We wiped the dust from the machines and plugged them in. As soon as the radio was turned on, a line from a model Beijing opera spilled out:
“This woman is indeed unusual.… ”
She quickly turned a dial, cutting off Ma Changli’s trailing voice rather brutally. Finally, she used a snow-white, fine cotton kerchief to clean the album gently. Her movements, full of love and care, made my cheeks burn. What a sharp contrast between us. Now I understood the power of contrast in the artistic world. In the past, I had known only that the contrast of shadow and color could produce a special visual effect of merely technical significance. Who would expect it could sometimes shake a person’s soul?
When the crystal needle started hissing along the turn-
ing album, she supported her chin with both hands, gazing at the light reflecting from the dark, rotating record.
Before I knew it the music rose, like a troubled man’s
sighing or moaning. Because I was a nonmusical person, it took a while before I could hear its warm, beautiful theme, a theme that in the most sensitive listeners produced a
heartrending pain or streams of hot tears. It sounded like a forbearance, a stubborn will to suffer through thorns, gravel, blunt-edged, serrated knives, grains of salt, and sharp bits of ice. I couldn’t help but be conquered by the 1 0 0
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sorrowful passions of Tchaikovsky conveyed in that cracked album. A vast tide pushed me irresistibly. With its push I slid into the depths of the sea. I shut my eyes submissively and yielded myself to it. Besides its effect, what emotions had I experienced before? There were some, but so shallow, so tasteless. The flow of the sorrowful music embraced me, drowned me, lapped at me. I was willing to perish in its rise and fall. Tiananmen Square, surging with a sea of people, arose in my sight. Although thousands on thousands of people had once trooped across Tiananmen, waving flags and