One Man's Bible (33 page)
A day of rain and another day of rain, fine continuous drizzle. School finished some time ago, after the two afternoon classes, because students must go home to work. Your room near the teachers’ office is made of brick, and there is a timber ceiling, so you do not need to worry about rain leaking in. Your mind is at peace, you like rainy days, and you no longer have to put on a big bamboo hat to work with your legs soaking in the paddy fields. With your door shut, there is the sound of the wind, the sound of the rain, as well as the sound of your reading. But not all of these sounds are audible, because you are only silently reading or writing in your mind. However, you are finally living the life of a normal human being, even if you do not have a family. You no longer want a woman to share your roof, you would prefer to live alone rather than run the risk of being exposed. If you feel the urge, you just write about it. By doing this, you win freedom for your imagination, and any woman you want can come to you via your pen.
“Teacher, Secretary Lu wants to see you!” a girl student was calling from outside his room.
He had fitted a spring lock so that people couldn’t just walk into his room. If he had to talk to his students, he went to the teachers’ office next door, especially in the case of girl students. The headmaster, who lived on the other side of the basketball field, was always watching his door. He had been headmaster of the primary school for twenty years, but now that it had suddenly been converted into a middle school, he was afraid of being replaced by this outsider under the protection of Secretary Lu. He wanted to catch this outsider in some act of impropriety with a girl student, so that he could be made to roll up his bedding and go away. However, he could not convince the headmaster that all he wanted was a place to stay in peace.
This student, Sun Huirong, was a pretty and lively girl. Her father had died of some illness a long time ago, and her mother sold vegetables at the cooperative in town in order to somehow bring up three daughters, Huirong being the eldest. Huirong was always trying to be nice to him: “Teacher, I’ll wash your dirty clothes for you!” “Teacher, I’ve brought you some amaranth fresh from our vegetable garden!” Whenever he passed by the Sun house, if the girl saw him, she would always run out and greet him, “Teacher, come in and have some tea!” He knew almost every family in the small street, and had visited their homes, either sitting for a while in the main hall or else having a cigarette on the doorstep. He had made this town his hometown and was now a local, but he had never been into this girl’s home. The girl said to him, “Our home is a women’s domain.” Probably she wanted a father and didn’t necessarily want a man.
The girl had come in from the rain, and her hair was all wet. He got an umbrella and told her to take it home with her, but when he went back inside to get a bamboo hat, the girl had run off. When he had almost caught up with her, he called out. She turned around in the rain and shook her head. The front of her shirt clung to her, revealing her small, developing breasts. She was happy and laughing as she ran off, probably pleased she had delivered such an important message to her teacher.
Lu lived in a rear-courtyard compound of the commune complex,
and he went in through the side gate opposite the river embankment. The yard was clean, paved with cobblestones, and there was a small well. At the time when that powerful landlord was executed, the man’s mistress was living in this small, secluded, peaceful compound. Lu was lounging on a bamboo couch cushioned with a piece of deerskin. A pot of meat with a delicious pungent aroma was stewing on the brazier that stood on the brick floor.
“It’s dog meat with chili. Old Zhang at the police station brought it, he said he had trapped a wild dog. Who can tell if it’s a wild dog or a domestic dog, anyway, that’s what he told me.” Lu didn’t get up. “Get a bowl and a pair of chopsticks, and pour some liquor. My back is no good, it’s an old gunshot wound and it gives me trouble whenever it rains. At the time, we were fighting a war, and no doctors were around, so just to stay alive counted as being lucky.”
He poured himself some liquor, then sat on the little stool by the brazier to eat and drink. Lu talked a lot as he lay on the bamboo couch.
“I’ve killed people, shot them dead myself, it was war, but I won’t go into all that. More people died at my hands than can be counted, and not all of them deserved to die. Instead, those who deserved to die didn’t.”
Lu suddenly reverted to his normal silence and indifference. He didn’t know what Lu was getting at, and this intrigued him.
“That old bastard, Lin Biao, plunged to his death, it’s been reported, hasn’t it?”
He nodded. The deputy chairman of the Party was trying to flee the country, and his plane had crashed in Mongolia. Well, that was how it was reported in official documents. The villagers were not particularly surprised, and they all said that by looking at Lin Biao’s monkey face, one could tell he would come to a nasty end. What if he had been handsome? In that case, the villagers would have thought he should be emperor.
“There are some people who didn’t plunge to death.” Lu came
out with this statement, then put down his drink. He could tell, Lu was angry and frustrated, but this statement was non-committal. Lu was experienced, and had been through political upheavals; it was not likely that he would tell him what was really on his mind. As for him, it would be unwise to jeopardize their relationship, because as long as Secretary Lu kept out of trouble, he, too, would be able to survive under his protective umbrella. Come on, drink some liquor to go with the dog meat. And stop worrying about whether it’s wild or domestic.
Lu got up and gave him a sheet of paper with a classical poem written on it. It followed the
lüshi
pattern for five-character lines, and expressed Lu’s joy over a certain person, Lin, plunging to his death. “Could you check if I’ve chosen words with the correct tones?”
This was probably why he had been asked to come. He thought about it for a while, suggested changing one or two words, then said he could find no other problems. He said he had a book on the patterns for
lüshi
poems and that he would have it sent over, so that Lu could use it as a reference.
“I grew up herding calves,” Lu said. “My family was poor and couldn’t afford to send me to school. I used to climb the tree by the village teacher’s window to listen to the young students reading their lessons aloud, and that was how I learned to recite Tang poetry. The old teacher saw that I was eager to learn, so he didn’t charge me tuition fees. From time to time, I would bring him a load of firewood, and whenever I had free time, I attended classes and learned to read. When I was fifteen, I shouldered a musket and went off to join the guerrillas.”
This whole stretch of mountains used to be the territory of Lu’s guerrilla band in those times, and, although now it was where he had been sent, without his being appointed, he was regarded as the secretary of all the newly reinstated Party secretaries by the communes all around. Lu lived here as a recluse. Lu told him he had enemies—
of course, not the local armies belonging to landlords, rich peasants, and local tyrants; they were all suppressed a long time ago. They were “some people up there.” He did not know where “up there” was, or who the “some people” he referred to were, but, clearly, the cadres in the county town wouldn’t be able to get rid of Lu. Lu could defend himself any time, the grass matting under his pillow concealed a bayonet, and, in a wooden box under the bed, was a light machine gun, which was in good condition and polished to a shine. There was also an unopened crate of ammunition. All this was commune militia equipment, yet he was storing it in his room with impunity.
Was Lu waiting for an opportunity to win back political power? Whether he had taken these precautions in case troubles should erupt, it was hard to tell.
“In times of peace, the people who live on these mountains cultivate the land, but in times of chaos, they are bandits. Beheadings used to be common, and I grew up watching them. Back in those times, the bandits were bound, but they held their heads high as they stood waiting for the ax, and they wouldn’t so much as flinch. It’s done differently nowadays. Those to be shot have to kneel, and their necks are tied. The guerrillas were bandits!” Another startling statement came from Lu’s lips: “But we had the political objective of overthrowing the powerful tyrants and dividing up the land.”
Lu did not say that the land divided up now all belonged to the state, and that, while a small amount of grain was allocated to each person, any surplus had to be handed over to the state.
“What the guerrillas wanted was money and grain. They kidnapped for ransom and tore their victims apart. If, at the designated time and place, a ransom was not delivered, they carried out the same acts of cruelty as the bandits. Two young bamboo saplings, the size of a rice bowl in girth, were held down, as a leg of the victim was tied to each sapling. With a cheer, they would let go of the saplings, and the victim would be catapulted up and torn apart!”
Lu had never done this, but he had obviously seen it done, and he was educating this bookish person, him.
“You’re a bookish outsider. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s easy to get by and that it’s peaceful here, in these mountains! If you don’t put down roots, you won’t survive!”
Lu didn’t talk the bureaucratic talk of the petty cadres who were doing their best to get promoted, and he completely swept away any lingering childhood fantasies he had about the revolution. Could it be that Lu would someday need him, and had to make him equally cruel and ruthless so that he could serve as a helper when this mountain king made his comeback to power? Lu also talked about the pale-complexioned intellectuals from town, who joined the guerrillas.
“What do students know about revolution? What the old man said was right.” The “old man” he was referring to was Mao. “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun! Which of those generals and political commissars doesn’t have blood on his hands?”
He told Lu he could never be a general, he was terrified of fighting. He wanted to make this quite clear in advance.
Lu said, “If that was not the case, why else would you have fled to these mountains? But you must be on guard against being butchered.”
This was the law of survival and this was based on Lu’s experiences in life.
“Go to the town and do a social survey, say that I sent you. You won’t need an official letter, just say it’s a job I’ve given you. I want you to write up historical materials on the class struggle in this town. Just listen to what people say, but, of course, don’t completely believe what anyone tells you. You don’t need to ask about what’s currently happening because you won’t get any answers. Let people prattle on, it will be just like listening to a story, and everything will become clear to you. Earlier on, there was no motor-vehicle access into this area, it was a bandits’ hideout. Don’t think that because the metal worker kowtowed to you he will obey you. He was let off and
he was grateful, but, put under pressure, he would chop you down in the dark from behind! That old woman with the limp, operating the hot-water urn on the street, did you think she had bound feet? Having bound feet was never the done thing in these mountains. After being kidnapped by guerrillas, the woman had her shoes stolen in the middle of winter, so all her toes froze off. But she was a woman, and, at least, her life was spared. This house belonged to her family. Her father was executed, and her eldest brother died on a prison farm. They say that her other sibling escaped overseas.”
He thus instructed you, and life, too, thus instructed you. As a result, the moral indignation and righteous anger imperceptibly rising from your residual feelings of sympathy and sense of justice were completely snuffed out.
“We’ve had too much to drink!” Lu said. “Tomorrow, when you wake up, come for a walk with me up to Nanshan. There used to be a temple on the mountain, but it was razed to the ground by Japanese bombs. The Japanese didn’t get there, they only got as far as the county town. The guerrillas had hidden on the mountain, so the Japanese could only bomb the temple on top. A monk had built the temple after the defeat of the Heavenly Kingdom of the Taipings, the Long Hairs. Hadn’t the bandits provided just the right environment for the rebellion of the Long Hairs? Still, the Long Hairs couldn’t compete with the imperial forces, and, when they lost, they fled to this mountain and became monks. There’s a broken tablet on the mountain. Some of the words are missing, but come and have a look at it.”
If one views the world through a lens, the world instantly changes, and even the ugliest things can become beautiful. You had an old camera, and, during those years in the countryside, it always went with you into the mountains. For you, it was another eye. You photographed scenes of the mountains, a mountain of bamboo swaying in the wind, green waves like a mass of feathers fixed on the negative as the shutter clicked. At night, you developed the film in your room, and, even though the color was lost, the brilliance of light in the contrasting of black and white was intriguing, as if it were a dream world. You were using expired movie film, a big two-hundred-meter spool, bought through a friend from a film studio before you left Beijing. For thirty
yuan
, it was virtually a gift. Back in those times, film studios only made news documentaries celebrating the revolution, and it was always with a jubilant fanfare of gongs and drums: the Great Leader inspects the Red Guards, the hydrogen bomb is successfully exploded, and acupuncture is used for anesthesia. Mao’s Thought brought victory after victory. By studying Mao’s Thought, patients underwent operations on their chests or stomachs, or Mount Everest was climbed and red flags fluttered on the rooftop of the world. The film studios had all gone over to using the overly reddish color film they had started producing in China, but you preferred black-and-white photographs, and could look at them endlessly, without tiring of them.
You looked at the colorless houses of the village, a gray-black roof and a pond in drizzling rain, a log bridge with a hen on it. You were especially fond of the hen. This black creature in front of your camera was pecking on the ground and had cocked its head to look around. Not knowing what a camera was, it stared right at it. Those shiny beady eyes were amazing, and you saw endless meanings in its cocked head and stare.
There was also a photograph of ruins. The insides of the buildings were overgrown with weeds, and the roofs had collapsed. It was a village that had died, and no one since had settled there; it had fallen into total decay and not a trace of the Great Leap Forward of that year remained. That year, all the grain harvested was handed over to the state, and the whole village, including the village Party secretary, was reduced to starving corpses. But the Party was dismissive, and had people put on guard at the county-town bus stop to prevent anyone sneaking in to beg for food. Anyway, the people in the town also had fixed grain rations, and the villagers would not have found anything to beg for. On this mountain, the bigger children all remembered digging up the roots of kudzu vines to fend off hunger; then, when they wanted to shit, having to bend over with their trousers off and getting smaller children to help them dig it out with twigs. The kudzu formed shit pellets that were as hard as rocks, and it was agony to take a shit. All this has been related by the students, and, of course, couldn’t be seen in the photograph, but the desolation that could be seen was beautiful. Viewed through the lens of a camera, even disasters could possess aesthetic qualities.
You also captured on camera two lovely young women, the older one eighteen years old, and the younger one fifteen. The older one’s
photograph was a profile of her deep in thought. Her father was a teacher in the middle school of the county town, and the father of her father, that is, her paternal grandfather, was a landlord. Before she completed middle school, she was sent to this remote mountain. The younger one had been a junior-middle-school student. Her father was a technician in an optometrist’s shop in the provincial capital, and, when his daughter decided she wanted to work in the countryside, he couldn’t stop her. In the photograph, this younger woman’s head was tilted, and she was laughing silly, as if she were being tickled. The two had been working on the mountain for a year, when the primary school reopened and teachers were needed. They were lucky; they no longer had to do manual labor, they became teachers. The two were happy and excited when you told them you wanted to bring your students on a tea-picking excursion. They said to stay at their school, it would be perfect, they had two classrooms so the boys could sleep in one and the girls in the other. The room in the middle was partitioned. The front part was for preparing class work and grading papers. Behind the partition, there was a plank bed—their bedroom; they said you could stay there and they would stay in the village. Before they came to the countryside, while they were at school, they would certainly have denounced their teachers. Yet seeing you, a teacher from the middle school in town, was for them just like meeting a member of their family. They were extremely hospitable, treated you to a meal of steamed salted pork, sautéed eggs, and bamboo-shoot soup, and they talked and chattered nonstop. It was on that occasion that you took the photograph. They were not like the village girls who would hide as soon as you held up the camera, they were self-assured and even posed for you. It was right when the younger woman burst into silly laughter that you pressed the shutter. After you developed and printed the photo, you saw that the older woman had turned her eyes from the camera and looked very sad, and that in the silly laugh of the
younger woman was wantonness seldom seen in so young a woman. It was under the thick black branches of an ancient torreya tree by a steep cliff that you took the photograph.
It was April, spring, it was green everywhere, and the tea-picking season was soon to begin. He went in by the hollow in the mountain, and, after crossing a big mountain and a log bridge over a deep river of roaring water that sparkled in the bright sun, arrived at this production brigade specializing mainly in growing tea and bamboo. Halfway up a mountain slope, he found the brigade leader digging holes and planting corn, and they came to an agreement that he would bring thirty students from town to spend ten days picking tea. The students would sleep on the floor in the primary school and would bring their own rice from home. The brigade would provide firewood, vegetables, oil, salt, and bean curd, and the cost for these would later be reimbursed by the school. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, but, as it was not advisable for him to spend the night in the mountains halfway back to town, the two teachers got him to stay the night at the school.
In the mountains, it got dark early, and, when the sun receded to the back of the cliff, the school sports field was already in darkness. The village stockade was shrouded in mist rising from the river, and the men and women on the mountain had stopped work, shouldered their hoes, and gone home. The village started to bustle with activity, dogs were barking, people were talking, and smoke started curling above the rooftops.
Outdoors, the air was heavy with moisture. The older woman got the charcoal fire going, and boiled a pot of water for him to soak his feet. After traveling a whole day on the mountain road, soaking his feet in the hot water relieved his fatigue and was very enjoyable. The other woman brought him her soap. They were grading student assignments by the kerosene lamp, when villagers started arriving after their evening meal. There were men, youths, and young girls. The men mostly sat around the fire, but the youths crowded around
the lamp on the table and started playing poker. The two women stacked up the exercise books and put them away. There were a few unmarried village women, but the married women with babies were probably busy at home. Children ran in and out and made an awful racket, while the men flirted and wrangled with the village women. The village women had sharp tongues, and, by comparison, the two women from the city had softer voices and spoke less. However, the student demeanor they had adopted when talking with him earlier had changed. Dirty words occasionally came from their lips, and they would tell anyone off. At night, the primary school served as a community club, and everyone was in high spirits.
“We’re putting out the lamps, we’re putting out the lamps! The teacher is worn out from walking all day and has to sleep!” The older woman started herding everyone out. People grumbled, but reluctantly went off. The two women also said good night and went off with the last of the crowd.
The remaining embers in the charcoal burner died, and the room suddenly turned cold. A chilly draught was streaming in from the classroom, so he got up and shut the door. It blew open again straight away. When he shut it again, he found there was no bolt. The door and doorframe was pitted with nail holes, but the bolt had been removed. He steadied himself, then went to the classroom to shut the main door, but, in the darkness, could not find the cross bar. The metal holders on the two parts of the door were there, but the cross bar was nowhere to be found. He got a desk and rammed it against the two parts of the door, returned for the lamp, then went into the inner room behind the wooden partition. On the far side, there was a small door that opened to the classroom. The bolt to the door had also been removed, and only the metal bolt-holder remained. Fortunately, the doorframe was tight, so the door was jammed shut. He didn’t go out again to see if the door of the other classroom could be bolted. Nothing here was worth stealing, apart from the two helpless young women from the city who usually slept here.
He blew out the lamp, took off his shoes, socks, and clothes, and lay down to listen to the mountain wind groaning like the deep growl of a wild animal. When the wind had passed, he again heard the sound of the water from the deep river. That night he slept badly. A nagging feeling that some wild thing was going to charge in any moment seemed to have kept him half-awake all night. In the morning, when he got up and pulled aside the blankets, he saw stains all over the gray sheet. The same stains were also all over the two pillows. He felt sick.
On the way back, his mind turned to what had happened with his student Sun Huirong, and he came to the realization that he had gradually become weak and cowardly after living these years in the countryside. He had hidden himself away securely, but, while he had peace of mind and could spend long periods of time in front of the mountain looking at the rushing river, not thinking about anything, he was, in fact, no better than a maggot.