The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  It was late August 1958. One December morning in Paris, I received a large brown envelope mailed by standard post. Inside was a large postcard depicting a temple half-hidden by the snowy branches of trees in flower. On the other side, in Korean ideograms, in a confident hand was a message that filled the entire space. With it, on a sheet of thin paper bearing the letterhead of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, was the translation, also handwritten. This is it:

  Dear M. Lanzmann,

  It was with great pleasure that I read the letter you addressed to me when leaving our country. By now, you must be back in your own country, I send you my warmest greetings. With all my heart I wish a great victory for all mothers and children who struggle against war and for peace.

  I remember how upset you were about the accident – which was rather funny – when I fell into the Taedong during our boat trip. Don’t be, it is an amusing memory that we will have for a long time to come. As for me, I will keep it deep in my heart together with the memory of your noble profile.

  Dear sir and noble friend, you who fight for peace, I wish you good health and great success in your work. France is far from my country, but once world peace has been established, all those who love peace will meet each other, I am sure.

  Kim Kum-sun

  Red Cross General Hospital of Korea

  Chapter 14

  The few days I spent hazardously strolling in Shenyang were a revelation, even if the highlights of the trip were supposed to be Beijing and Shanghai. After North Korea, where everything had been inhuman tension, strictness, discipline, submissiveness, the triumph of the impossible, the empty colour of life, after all this, my first Chinese city seemed like a paradigm of freedom, human inventiveness, happiness and the joy of the possible. I remembered Sartre who, three years before me, in 1955, had, with Castor, made the trip to China, though not Korea. Of the Chinese, he wrote: ‘industrious without industry’. I will come back to the subject of industry, but there can be no doubt they were industrious: the range of notebooks, pencils, inks, made the stationery shops in Shenyang magical places. I wanted to buy everything, bring everything back to France, even though Chris recommended I wait until we got to Beijing, the metropolis, where all those things that delighted me about the Manchurian capital would be multiplied a hundredfold. Not to mention how tall the northern Chinese were, how big their teeth, revealed every time they burst out laughing, something culturally considered polite. Sartre was not alone in writing about China; Castor quickly capitalized on the six weeks she had spent in the Middle Kingdom, launching into a book 500 pages long for which, once again, I came up with the title: La Longue marche. For I did not arrive in China with absolutely no knowledge. The Communists had come to power ten years earlier, forcing Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang into exile in Formosa, which, given the intensity of the Cold War, immediately became a bastion of the other camp. With the same passion I had devoted to reading about Richard Hillary and the Battle of Britain, I had devoured every book that traced this legendary, epic retreat-turned-victory of the Eighth Route Army as it travelled from south China to north with a sweeping detour west, famously known as the Long March; books by great reporters as only Americans can be, in particular Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China. To me the finer work is Belden’s, which is less ideological, but both had been published in French with beautiful crimson covers in Gallimard’s Collection Rouge, an imprint that no longer exists and which no one at the company seems to remember. Another book in the same collection, a thrilling 500- page masterpiece entitled Eastern Approaches, by the British diplomat Fitzroy Maclean, kept me reading through the night. Fitzroy Maclean was a man of remarkable intelligence and unimaginable daring that took him from Paris to Moscow, from Moscow to Soviet Central Asia, where no Westerner before him had been. His accounts of the Moscow show-trials, especially that of Bukharin, his intense understanding of the accused, the extraordinarily accurate portrait he gives of Bukharin facing down his judges and the prosecutor Vyshinsky, his description of the moustached face of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – alias Stalin – peering out from a small window high up under the ceiling of the courtroom, if one rereads them today, say much more about the horror of the Soviet regime than many works of history or post hoc so-called philosophical explanations. But, to add to his intelligence and daring, Fitzroy Maclean also had considerable courage, an acerbic sense of humour and an all-consuming sense of adventure. During the war, he was to be found in the desert of Cyrenaica in Libya with the raiders of the British Eighth Army who operated far behind Rommel’s lines, often at the loss of close friends whom he salutes in an unforgettably understated manner. The same indomitable death-dodger was then sent by Churchill to Yugoslavia to represent the interests of the British empire to Tito in his stubborn and painstaking attempt to encircle Hitler’s armies. Here again the lively, funny portraits sketched by this diplomat daredevil Lawrence of the Balkans are those of a born writer and it is easy to understand why they were published in Gallimard’s Collection Rouge, an imprint that should be revived to bring these forgotten, flawless treasures back to light.

  China Shakes the World is a scrupulous and moving account of the 12,000 kilometres and the twelve months of the epic and murderous gesture that was the Long March, which Jack Belden witnessed at first-hand, following Mao Zedong’s shabby soldiers on their long trek to the caves of Yan’an. Fewer than a quarter of the 130,000 men who set out on the march survived. What moved me when I read the book was how these illiterate soldiers were taught to read and write during calmer periods on the long summer march: every day, a single ideogram in huge script was posted on the back of every cart so that those following behind could immerse themselves in its form, its every brushstroke. The following day there would be another, and then another, until the troops, during the group lessons held whenever the march halted, could identify and reproduce each one.

  Chris had brought a copy of Sunday in Beijing, the film he had made on his first trip, the year before. He wanted to show it to Chinese officials, hoping to get logistical and financial support for his great project, a feature film based on the popular legend of the Monkey King. In Shenyang, in the lobby of our hotel, he organized a screening for the city and Party officials. Sunday in Beijing is about thirty minutes long with a commentary by Chris, devoted almost entirely to what remained of pre-revolutionary Beijing, that timeless Beijing that the new rulers scorned, consumed instead by the idea of destroying it. He gave a brief introduction, which was translated by an interpreter, and the screening took place in deathly silence. The officials did not understand what they were watching, but rejected it nonetheless, getting up without applauding and leaving without a word. The following day we set off for Beijing where the film was scheduled to be screened in the main hall of the Sino-Soviet Friendship building, which held at least 500 people. I advised Chris that if he really wanted the support of the Ministry for Light Industry, which oversaw filmmaking, he would do better to cancel the Beijing screening. Though disheartened by the response in Shenyang, he was still hopeful and did not follow my advice – the hostility between us had not yet disappeared, but I felt sorry for him and truly wanted to help. What I had feared did in fact transpire: the same leaden silence, the same rushed exit, no accolades, only this time to the nth degree, and in the capital of the empire. Chris never managed to get his interview with the ministerial department in charge of cinema and the legend of the Monkey King was never filmed by him. Two days later, at dusk, he said something that broke my heart. We were sitting in the back seat of a huge Zim Soviet limousine on our way back from a moving visit to the Great Wall when suddenly, through clenched teeth, Chris broke the silence: ‘This is what I love, collusion.’ I squeezed his arm and that was the beginning of a genuine friendship, a friendship that has been unfailing and unshakeable and constantly renewed by our personal and professional admiration for each other.

  I a
m not going to recount here for the umpteenth time my trip to China as was then the fashion for the rare few who travelled there. I will mention only one or two milestones: what they called the ‘Rectification Campaign’ was at its height. Following the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which many people had recklessly dropped their masks, naïvely embracing the inconceivable freedom to speak the truth, came the period of fierce, ruthless criticism, of everyone accusing everyone else, heralding the mad excesses of the Red Guards and the populist communes, extraditions to the countryside for purposes of ‘re-education’, the triumph of rural purity over urban decay. In every factory and university on our itinerary, every wall was covered from floor to ceiling with dàzìbàos, huge handwritten posters, statements of bitterness and hatred that dripped with a terror no one could or would escape. A Shakespearean question of deadly seriousness recurred again and again in these dàzìbàos, that of the ‘Red experts’. Who, they asked, should be favoured, those with expertise or those who fervently adhered to the Party line – though it was rather a jagged line during those years. Red or expert, Red and expert, that was the question. I remember sitting in the office of the head of the department of Romance Languages at the University of Beijing, a private office plastered with dàzìbàos and posters criticizing him by students he could not prevent from coming in even while I was sitting there, to jeer at him with a violence that terrified me. One of his younger colleagues had posted a dàzìbào that he translated as: ‘I shall be Red with all my heart and expert with all my mind.’ As we know, red blood would flow, prevailing over expertise. When I asked the head of department, in French, what they were criticizing him for, he burst out laughing, baring his teeth like the northern Chinese he was, answering in a thin, reedy voice, ‘Oh, pride! Pride!’ A year later, this pride saw him dispatched to a remote, enforced retirement where he was to spend ten years, something that utterly broke his pride, his expertise and him. Today, leaders of the Communist Party of China, the Central Committee and the Politburo, are likely to be qualified engineers, such as Hu Jintao, the current General Secretary, a hydraulic engineer. They are undeniably experts, but the most rigid dichotomy is still practised: under the cloak of this expertise, the old Red Guard still controls, with an iron fist in a velvet glove, the hearts and minds of one and a half billion people.

  The ‘friendship’ between the peoples of China and the Soviet Union were increasingly strained at the time, foreshadowing their break-up. Contrary to what Sartre wrote, China was doing everything it could to build up industry: in the 200-metre-long workshop of a machine tools factory, its walls covered with dàzìbàos, black or blood red, all the machines in the production line were Soviet, but what rolled off the line was a Chinese machine tool, born to patriotic cheers, hostile to the USSR, immediately stamped with the national flag and with proud ideograms. These brand new machine tools would be used to equip other factories throughout the region. As in North Korea – though it was actually Kim Il-sung who was imitating his Chinese comrades – the idea that the great industrial complexes, the old Manchurian steelworks for example, would not in themselves be enough to satisfy the needs of a vast country, had taken root. They had to be replaced with rural steelworks, unsuited to producing specialized or high-quality steel, but capable of supplying less tempered metal, sufficient for everyday junk. Together with the ubiquitous dàzìbào, the rivalry and one-upmanship between rural villages over steelwork production figures, the promised productivity in future months, was the second revolution to galvanize the Red Chinese. Now we know that the rural steelworks were a folly that turned out to be a disaster. But at the time they were a banner in the populist communes and a decisive weapon for Mao in the unprecedented civil war, the general unrest, the confusion he was determined to unleash so he could consolidate power and, having eliminated countless suspects at every level of society, rule unchallenged. The Rectification Campaign I witnessed was the forerunner to that evil upheaval.

  When we arrived in Beijing, we were asked what we wished to do. I said I would like to meet President Mao in person, or Zhou Enlai, the Premier at the time. Every night I was told to be patient, leading me to hope that something might happen. While I waited, I explored Beijing, though I was never able to visit the Forbidden City, the Imperial Palace or the Temple of Heaven. The Forbidden City, I discovered, truly was so. I became aware of the level of indoctrination and the stupidity of the lower echelons of the Party, whether guides or interpreters. One day at dawn, at about five o’clock, I am walking with my interpreter, a graceless young woman, along a hutong – one of those crudely cobbled narrow Beijing streets lined by low, single-storey houses around a central courtyard. In the distance, three figures are approaching, two women and a man, waving a red flag firmly attached to a pole. In the deserted dawn street I ask my guide, ‘What’s going on? Who are they?’ She replies, donnish and dogmatic, ‘They are the masses.’ In Shanghai, the itinerary includes a visit to happy, domesticated capitalists who declare themselves freer in business matters since the revolution, laughing and showing their teeth after every sentence. These teeth no longer bite, but perhaps they sense that there are better days ahead for capitalism and that, in the end, it will prevail. This was fifty years ago. Our most unpleasant duty was a visit to a re-education camp for prostitutes, a revolting attempt to break women who were unbreakable: this was clear from their defiant stares during the indoctrination sessions, in their refusal to lower their eyes while evil-looking female ‘instructors’ accompanied by prostitute kapos slowly passed them in review, examining each in turn, by the way they stared at visitors, a mixture of supreme arrogance and almost sexual provocation. Some, even in these intolerable circumstances, still had a mesmerizing beauty. Castor, like Sartre, was charmed by the intellectual fluidity of Chinese Communists, who had not banned prostitution as one might have expected them to. There were so many prostitutes, the authorities had argued, that putting them out of work would only create social problems much more serious than the moral problem of tolerating the flesh trade. But times had recently changed and, in this domain, ‘rectification’ was ruthless: they had now begun to be re-educated, but were still resisting.

  Still in Shanghai: I am alone for the afternoon on the Bund, the embankment of the Huangpu River where, before the revolution, there were skyscrapers – banks and multinational companies, historic hotels built by Iraqi Jews in the late nineteenth century, the Sassoons and the Kadouris, who were at the heart of the rapid capitalistic expansion of this incredible city. The Bund was famous for its opulence, and for its heavy traffic, both on the river and on land. It was also a place for wheeling and dealing of all kinds. But on this afternoon in 1958, ten years after the Red Army marched into the city, the Bund and the river are completely deserted. Not a car, not a boat, not a living soul. The skyscrapers are intact, neither destroyed nor inhabited, vestiges of a world that has vanished never to return. But wait, there is a living soul. A man. A funny little Chinese man in a cap who appears to be watching me intently, constantly advancing towards me only to retreat again. I try to ignore him, to embrace in a single glance the roaring Huangpu, Pudong on the far shore upstream, and here, where I stand, the spectral skyline of useless towers. The man does not give up; he smiles, he circles me, I notice he seems to be juggling something with his hands, moving something swiftly from one to the other. Behind me is a stone bench, a remnant of yesteryear, I go and sit down; the man becomes bolder, approaches, retreats again, I now see that he is shuffling cards, fanning them out then snapping them together, glancing around furtively. I smile at him, what does he want to sell me? Pornographic photos, perhaps? This is what I imagine. A shabby imagination. He is beside me now, nearly touching me, and the images he flashes before my eyes with the speed and skill of a conjurer are of the Bund. They are postcards of the exact spot where we are, but long ago, thronged with cars and elegant pedestrians, umbrellas, bowler hats, frock coats, liveried porters and, on the river, boats and ships of every conceivable tonnage, long barge
s filled to overflowing. Because of his act of resistance, the dangers and fear of getting caught, because we had to act quickly, I bought every postcard, showering the hawker with yuan.

  Back in Beijing, guides and interpreters whispered to me with greedy, conspiratorial expressions that I had to be prepared and to stay at the hotel: I might be summoned at any moment. Impossible to say who might summon me, Mao, Zhou, they themselves did not know, but the Castle would certainly get in touch. I spent a sleepless night. Beijing had been at fever pitch for forty-eight hours: American marines had just landed in the Lebanon and the Chinese demonstrated spectacular support for Arab countries, of Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of the ephemeral United Arab Republic (the union between Egypt and Syria), who, two years earlier, had nationalized the Suez Canal and forced the Franco-British allies of Israel to end their military intervention. After the official speeches made from the famous balcony on Tiananmen Square, immediately translated into Arabic for the ambassadors and their wives, it was time for the people to express their solidarity. From Tiananmen and Chien-Men, on each side of the avenue that divides the Tartar city from the Chinese, for as far as the eye could see, 500,000 Pekinese, a caviar of black heads, marched past for hours, brandishing fists, flags and streamers, improvising brief, violent open-air theatrics on the subject of the American landings. Led by Death himself (a tall, thin Chinese man wearing a black cape over his shoulders, his face and body made up to look like a skeleton), the Arab people in chains advance into a circle of spectators. The Arab people: two women in gypsy skirts made up as Chinese women never were and two swarthy men in rags with black painted sideburns. Heavy chains bind their arms. An American in uniform – sunglasses, beard and moustache – and an Arab sheik in a turban follow them, brandishing whips. The clash of a Beijing Opera gong. Drums roll. The sheik, miming hatred and fear, raises his whip and rushes at his own people. But the people do not retreat, and twice they knock the sheik to the ground. The American then orders the sheik to get up and strike them. The sheik, a rictus of terror on his face, lashes out at one of the chained men until he falls to the ground. Clash of cymbals: the people suddenly throw off their chains and pick up guns – real guns – given to them by the audience. The sheik and the American, ashen with fear, throw themselves on the ground, pleading, while the people, resolute and determined, trample them underfoot. The American screams hoarsely. To the sound of aeroplanes, well imitated by drums, two Chinese men wearing false noses and sailors’ berets divide the crowd, pushing papier-mâché models of US gunships before them. The people retreat twice around the circle before one of the Arabs shouts in Chinese, ‘Americans! Leave Lebanon, leave Korea, leave Taiwan, leave the Philippines, leave Japan!’ The audience picks up the chant and the Arabs have only to advance for the American marines to turn and flee, scurrying away on all fours ashamed.