One Man's Bible (37 page)
Half an hour later, Lu had taken out bowls and chopsticks, and poured liquor. The cook from the dining room arrived and brought out plates of quick-fried dishes, still hot, from a covered basket. He was not in the mood for drinking, and deeply regretted not having stopped to talk to Sun Huirong. But then, what would he have said to her?
You and she seemed to be from two different worlds. Although your world could never be clean, she was stuck in this coal pit, and would never be able to pull herself out. She had forgotten the distance separating you from her, forgotten her experiences, and forgotten her status as a whore in the eyes of the locals. To her, you were her teacher, she was not asking for your help, and probably she had never again thought of changing her circumstances. It was a sudden and total innocence that had resurfaced, a hazy childhood infatuation, and she was so happy that she forgot herself. As you came to this realization, you flinched from the pain of having hurt her like this, and for a long time you couldn’t forgive yourself for being so weak.
At night, lying in Lu’s bedroom with the secret tunnel, he listened to the sound of water flowing outside the window and the waves of wind blowing through the pine forest. Early the next day, he crossed
the river and hurried to the village to get the early bus back to the county town.
You had a photograph of Sun Huirong. You had taken it at a performance of the revolutionary opera,
A Qing Sao,
by the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team on National Day. It was before she had been assigned to the production brigade, when you had helped her with her makeup and lipstick. She sang the role of the heroine, A Qing Sao, who fought the bandit army of the Japanese puppet government. This opera had been prescribed in the syllabus issued by the County Education Bureau, and all the students had to learn to sing the songs from it in the music class. She had the best voice. It was impossible to know if she now had a man or was still a whore in the coal mine, which was run as a peasant collective enterprise. After you left China, the authorities sealed off your apartment in Beijing, and those photographs, together with your books and handwritten manuscripts, were all confiscated.
While you were still in China, a former student, who had gone on to graduate from university, was sent on a job to Beijing and paid you a visit. When you asked him about Secretary Lu, he said that he had died. You asked how he had died.
“Sickness, I suppose,” he said. But he had only heard this.
You had never met Lu’s wife. It was said that she taught at the regional teachers’ college, but that she was often on sick leave because of psychological problems. She stayed with her daughter, but that could have been a means of self-preservation, to avoid being implicated. Also, a woman might not necessarily have been able to endure the life of a recluse in the mountains.
Afterward, you had a dream. The village did not have houses that were close to one another or huddled around a small street and a few lanes. It was desolate, and the houses were scattered and far apart. The school was on a hill, and it was empty. The windows and doors were all wide open. You went to look for Lu; his home looked like a village dwelling, but stood all alone, with no other houses around.
There was an iron padlock on the door. It was in the afternoon, and the setting sun was shining on the orange earthen walls. You were not sure what to do, but seemed to have come to him to work out a way of getting you out of this place. You didn’t want to spend your whole life, grow old, and die in this empty school. They had told you to guard the school, grade endless homework books. You had no time to look up to think about your own affairs, although you were not sure what, in fact, you wanted to think about. As you stood before the mud wall looking at the padlock hanging on the door, you heard behind you the sound of the wind rising from the paddy fields. It was late autumn, after the harvest, and only grain stubble remained. . . .
The first time he ever saw the great man at such close range was in Tiananmen Square, midway between the Imperial Palace and Qianmen, behind the Memorial of the Heroes of the People. The recently completed mausoleum, constructed with heavy-duty steel-reinforced concrete, was said to be capable of withstanding nuclear bombs and point-nine earthquakes. In the crystal casket, Mao’s head was really big, it was clearly swollen, and this could be seen in spite of the heavy makeup. He was five meters away, and filing past in the queue only allowed two or three seconds. There was no time to articulate what was on his mind.
He felt that he had things to say to the old man. Of course, not to the corpse of the Leader of the people in the crystal casket, but to Mao wearing only a bathrobe. Whether he had just got out of bed with some woman friend, or had just got out of the swimming pool, was not important; moreover, that such a great leader had numerous women friends shouldn’t be held against him. He simply wanted to speak to the old man after he had taken off his Commander-in-Chief army uniform and his Great Leader’s mask. You really lived fully as a human being, and it must be admitted that you possessed individuality, that you really were a Superman. You succeeded in dominating China, and your ghost still hovered over more than one billion Chinese. Your influence was so powerful that it spread to all parts of the world, and it was pointless to deny this. What he wanted to say was, you could kill people at will. What he wanted to tell Mao was, you made every single person speak your words.
He also wanted to say that history would fade into oblivion, but, back in those days, he had been forced to say what Mao had dictated, therefore, it was impossible for him to eradicate his hatred for Mao. Afterward, he had said to himself that as long as Mao was revered as leader, emperor, god, he would not return to that country. However, what gradually became clear to him was that it was impossible for a person’s inner mind to be subjugated by another, unless that person allowed it.
What he finally wanted to say was that although it was possible to kill a person, no matter how frail the person was, that person’s human dignity could not be killed. A person is human because this bit of self-respect is indestructible. When a person’s life is like an insect’s, is the person aware that an insect also possesses its own insect dignity? Before an insect is trampled or squashed to death, it will pretend to be dead, struggle, or try to run away in order to save itself, but its insect dignity can’t be trampled to death. People have been killed off like the grass under the blade, but does the grass under the blade seek to be forgiven? People are clearly inferior to grass. What he wanted to prove was that, as well as life, people have human dignity. If preserving one’s human dignity is impossible, and one isn’t killed and doesn’t commit suicide, then, if one does not want to die the only option is to flee. Dignity is an awareness of existence, and it is in this that the power of the frail individual lies. Once one’s awareness of existence is extinguished, the apparition of existence, too, is extinguished.
Enough of all this, all this nonsense. But he had sustained himself precisely through this nonsense. Now, when he could finally speak
these words openly to Mao, the old man had already been dead for some years, so he could only address them to Mao’s spirit or shadow.
Mao was wearing a bathrobe, he had probably just come out of the swimming pool. He was tall and had a fat belly. His high-pitched voice was somewhat like a woman’s, and he had a thick Hunan accent. His kindly benign face was just as it was in the unchanging oil portrait on the wall in Tiananmen Square. To look at, he was an amiable person. He liked smoking, was a chain smoker, and his teeth were stained black from tobacco. He smoked specially manufactured Panda-brand cigarettes with a pungent aroma. Mao also liked richly flavored foods, for example, fatty pork with chili, a point that had not been fabricated in the memoirs of his doctor.
“Friend,” Mao said. Mao sometimes addressed people as “friend” and not always as “comrade” because he had many young women friends, and, of course, he couldn’t be ranked with them. The only man in China who succeeded in having Mao address him as “friend” was Lin Biao. Later, when it was said that Lin Biao’s plane went down at Öndörhaan in Mongolia while he was fleeing the country, the Party took the unprecedented action of making photographs of the plane wreckage public. Among foreigners, there was Nixon. Mao had a lot to chat about with him, and, once they started talking, it went on for three hours. At the time, Mao, close to eighty, was being kept alive with injections, and talked and laughed with great gusto, so that even that intelligent Jew, Kissinger, while not adoring him, greatly admired him.
When Mao said “friend,” he certainly couldn’t have been addressing him, but he went forward regardless. What he wanted to ask was, “Did you really believe in the utopian state of Marx’s communism, or did you just use it as a front?” Back then, he had naively asked this question, but he wouldn’t have asked it later on.
“There are more than a hundred political parties in the world, and most of them no longer believe in Marxism-Leninism,” Mao said in a letter to his wife, Jiang Qing, during the early part of the Cultural
Revolution. The letter, clearly also addressing the entire Party, was not bedroom talk between husband and wife, but, afterward, it was used as important evidence to purge Mao’s widow, and was presented before the entire Chinese people.
At the time, he preferred to think that since Mao had said this, probably he believed it. So, the old man did want to create this sort of a paradise on earth, if it didn’t count as hell. That was what he also wanted to ask at the time.
“It was only the initial stage,” Mao said.
Then when will the next stage come about? he reverently asked.
“In seven or eight years, it will come again,” Mao wrote in a letter to his wife, “the Cultural Revolution is a serious trial practice.” The old man took another cigarette, paused for a while, then went on to write, “Moreover, after seven or eight years, there will be another movement to purge all Ox Demons and Snake Spirits. And, after that, there will be many more purges.” After finishing the letter, he laughed, showing the black teeth in his mouth. According to the memoirs of Mao’s doctor, he smoked three packs a day and never used a toothbrush, and this was apparent from the news documentaries of Mao in old age meeting with foreign guests.
The old man was really a great military strategist! He had hoodwinked the people of China and many people in the world. This was also what he wanted to say.
Mao frowned.
He hastened to add: You defeated all of your enemies and won every single battle in your life.
“Don’t let your brains be addled by victory. I am ready to fall down and be smashed to pieces, but this is of no consequence. Matter is not destroyed, it only disintegrates.” Mao had written this in that no-longer-secret family letter subsequently made public by the Party.
Only your wife was smashed. You, old man, still enjoy good health. People still go to visit you in your mausoleum, and this is
irrefutable testimony to your greatness, he said to Mao’s spirit or shadow.
“Believing I will live two hundred years, I set out to swim three thousand
li
.”
You wrote poetry from your early years, and it must be said that you were a great writer of classical poetry, but your tyranny is without precedent, you destroyed all the writers of the country, and it is in this that you were great. He said that he, too, did a bit of writing, but that he had to wait until after the old man was dead.
“In my person, I have, first, the spirit of the tiger, and, second, the spirit of the monkey.”
He said that, in his case, he had, at most, a minute amount of the spirit of the monkey.
The old man gave the hint of a smile, as if he had squashed some insect. He stubbed out more than half of a cigarette, indicating that he wanted to rest.
Mao lay in the crystal casket, and it seemed that the Party flag covered his body, he couldn’t remember too clearly. In any case, the Party led the country, and Mao led the Party, it really wasn’t necessary for him to be covered with the national flag. In the long queue filing past Mao’s remains, he probably had these unformed words in his mind, but didn’t dare to pause. After he had walked past, he didn’t dare look back, afraid that the people behind would notice the strange look in his eyes.
Writing freely about it now, this is what you want to say to this emperor who ruled as dictator over one billion people. Because you are insignificant, the emperor in your heart can only be the dictator of one person, and that person is yourself. Now that you have said this publicly, you have walked out of Mao’s shadow, but this was not an easy thing to do. You were born at the wrong time, and encountered the era of Mao’s rule, but your being born in that era had nothing to do with you, and was decided by what is known as fate.
You no longer live in other people’s shadows, nor treat other people’s shadows as imaginary enemies. You simply walked out of their shadows and stopped making up nonsense and fantasies. You are now in a vast expanse of emptiness and tranquility. You came into the world naked and without cares, there is no need to take anything away with you, and even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to. Your only fear is unknowable death.
You recall that your fear of death began in childhood, and that your fear of death then was much worse than it is now. The slightest ailment made you worry that it was an incurable disease, and, when you fell ill, you would think up all sorts of nonsense and be stricken with terror. Your having survived so many illnesses and even disasters is purely a matter of luck. Life in itself is an inexplicable miracle; to be alive is a manifestation of that miracle. Is it not enough that a conscious physical body is able to perceive the pains and joys of life? What else is there to be sought?
Your fear of death came about when you were mentally and physically weak. There was the feeling of not being able to breathe, and you were afraid that you would not be able to last long enough to take your next breath. It was as if you were falling into an abyss, this sensation of falling was often present in dreams during your childhood, and you would awaken in fright, drenched in perspiration. In those days, when there was nothing wrong with you, your mother used to take you for numerous hospital tests. Nowadays, even under your doctor’s instructions to have tests, you often procrastinate.
It is clear that life naturally ends, and when the end comes, fear vanishes, because fear is itself a manifestation of life. On losing awareness and consciousness, life abruptly ends, and there can be no further thinking and no further meaning. Your affliction had been your search for meaning. When you began discussing the ultimate meaning of human life with the friends of your youth, you had hardly lived. However, it seems that having savored virtually all of the sensations to be experienced in life, you simply laugh at the futility of searching for meaning. It is best just to experience this existence, and, moreover, to look after it.
You seem to see him in a vast emptiness, with a faint light coming from some unidentified source. He is not standing on any specific or defined patch of ground. He is like the trunk of a tree, but has no shadow, and the horizon between the sky and the earth has vanished. Or, he is like a bird in some snow-covered place, looking here and there, occasionally staring ahead, as if deep in thought, although it is not clear what he is pondering. It is simply a gesture, a gesture of aesthetic beauty. Existence is, in fact, a gesture, it is striving to be comfortable, stretching the arms, bending the knees, turning to look back upon his consciousness. Or, it may be said that the gesture is actually his conscious mind, that it is you in his conscious mind, and it is from this that he is able to gain some fleeting happiness.
Tragedy, comedy, farce, do not exist but are aesthetic judgments of human life, which differ according to the person, the time, and the place. Emotional responses are probably also like this, and what is felt now and what is felt at some other time can fluctuate between
being perceived as sad and being seen as absurd. And there is no longer any need for mockery, for it seems that there has been enough self-ridicule and self-purification. It is only in the gesture of tranquilly prolonging this life and striving to comprehend the mystery of this moment in time, that freedom of existence is achieved. It is through this act of solitarily scrutinizing the self, that others’ perceptions of one’s self lose relevance.
You do not know what other things you will do, or what else there is to do, but this is of no consequence. If you want to do something, you do it. It’s fine if you do it, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t. And you don’t have to persist in doing something. If, at a particular moment, you feel hungry and thirsty, you just go and have something to eat and drink. Of course, you still have your own opinions, interpretations, inclinations, and you even get angry, because you are not so old that you don’t have the energy for anger. Naturally, you still become indignant, but it is with little passion. And while you still have the capacity for feelings and sensory pleasures, then so be it. However, there is no longer remorse. Remorse is futile and, needless to say, harmful to one’s self.
For you, only life is of value, you have a lingering attachment to it, it continues to be interesting because there are still things to discover and amaze you. It is only life that can excite you. That is just how it is with you, isn’t it?