One Man's Bible (10 page)

When the Red Guards first formed at the workplace, he and other youths without a Five Red Categories background accepted the invitation to attend a meeting. It was there that Danian first revealed what he was capable of. Seated at one end of the bench of the main table, he said to those who didn’t qualify to be Red Guards, “You people attending our Red Guard meeting today count in our revolutionary ranks as fellow travelers!” Danian confronted him by calling out his name—“Of course, that includes you!”—to let him know that it referred to him as well. However, having read
The History of
the USSR
, he knew precisely what “fellow traveler” signified. If Lin had not warned him, and those manuscripts of his were found, he would certainly have been destroyed by this fellow in this surprise attack.

Danian retained his air of formality and said, “We’re here to search for reactionary criminal evidence on Tan Xinren, and this has nothing to do with you. Which are your belongings? Separate them from his.”

He put on a smile and said, “I’ve already separated my things, is there something else I can do to help?”

They all said, “This is none of your business, this is none of your business. Which is his desk?”

“That’s his, the drawers aren’t locked.”

He pointed it out, then stood to one side. This was all he could say in defense of his roommate, Tan. But at the same time, he had drawn a line of demarcation between Tan and himself. Only later did he find out that, just as he was going downstairs to get his bicycle to hurry home, a Red Guard notice had been posted in the front hall of the workplace building: “Seize Tan Xinren with his history as a counterrevolutionary!” Old Tan, immediately isolated in the workplace building, had lost his freedom.

They pulled out Old Tan’s notebooks, translation manuscripts, letters, photographs, and English-language books. Tan translated some novels from English in his spare time, mostly prorevolutionary works by writers from Asia and Africa. However, there was an English novel with a half-naked foreign woman on the cover, and this was put to one side. From under the old-newspaper lining of a drawer, they pulled out a white envelope. It was found to contain several condoms.

“The old bastard is still at this sort of thing!”

Danian took one and waved it about. Everyone laughed.

It wasn’t that the people involved were amused, but that everyone
was putting on an act of being pure and chaste. He and Lin also laughed but avoided one another’s eyes.

Later, at the mass meeting called to criticize him, they questioned Old Tan about the woman he had an “improper sexual relationship” with. It was intimated that Old Tan was involved in a spy network, and he was forced to name the woman, a widow. Immediately, the Red Guards at the woman’s work unit were notified, and her home, too, was searched. Some heartrending classical poems in Tan’s drawer, probably written for this woman, constituted irrefutable evidence of “anti-Party, anti-Socialist longings for the paradise of the past.”

The Red Guards found two loose bricks in the house and pried them up.

“Should I go and borrow a spade from a neighbor?”

He had deliberately asked Danian this to avoid the pain of being subjected to a search. At the same time, he wanted to play a joke: they might as well dig three feet down and make an archaeological discovery. Terror only came afterward. He borrowed a pickax from the old retired worker next door, and they began digging, filled the room with dirt and bits of brick so that there was nowhere to step, then threw down the pickax and left.

It was afterward that he found out the surveillance unit at his workplace had been informed by the street committee that the sound of a wireless transmitter was coming from their room. The person who had reported it must have been the old retired worker next door. When Old Tan and he had gone off to work, the old man, who was at home, heard the crackle of the radio they had forgotten to turn off behind the locked door. He took it to be a secret transmitter and must have thought that if he could catch the enemy it would prove his total loyalty to the Leader and the Party. When he ran into the old codger in the courtyard after the search, the man’s wrinkled old face was beaming with smiles. Disaster had thus brushed by him.

10

The lights are off, and you’re lying in the dark on a bed with a woman, your bodies close to one another, and you are telling her about the Cultural Revolution. Nothing could be more futile, and only a Jewish woman with a German mind, who has learned Chinese, could possibly be interested.

“Shall I keep going?” you ask.

“I’m listening,” she says.

You say there was a middle-aged woman who worked as an editor in your office. A political cadre summoned her and said there was a telephone call for her in the security office. She returned some minutes later to the office, tidied the proofs on her desk, and, looking at the expressionless faces in the office, announced that her husband had gassed himself and that she was going home to attend to things. The head of the office was in solitary confinement, and Old Liu, the department chief, had been labeled an alien-class element who had wormed his way into the Party, so she could only request leave from those left in the office. Early the following day, she wrote a poster, clearly drawing a line of demarcation between herself and her husband who had “cut himself off from both the people and the Party.”

“Don’t go on, it’s heartbreaking,” she whispers into your ear.

You say you have no desire to go on.

“Why was this happening?” she asks.

“Enemies had to be found; without enemies, how could the political authorities sustain their dictatorship?”

“But that’s how it was with the Nazis!” She is excited. “You should write about all this!”

You say you are not a historian, you’re lucky enough to have escaped, and there’s no need for you to make another sacrifice to history.

“Then write about your own experiences, your personal experiences. You should write all this up, this is valuable!”

“Historically valuable? When the many thousands of tons of archives become public, it will just be a wad of scrap paper.”

“But Solzhenytsin—”

You cut her short and say you’re not a fighter and you’re not a flag-bearer.

“But don’t you think that some day things will change?” She needs to have faith.

You say you are not a fortune-teller, and you don’t live in empty hope, and you will not be lining up in the streets to welcome it. You will not be returning to China during your lifetime, and there is no need for you to waste the little life you have left.

She softly apologizes for stirring up these memories, and says that to understand your suffering is to understand you, can’t you see?

You say you got out of hell and don’t want to go back.

“But you need to talk about it, and, while you are, maybe you will become less uptight about it.” Her voice is gentle, she wants to comfort you.

You ask if she has ever played with sparrows, or watched children at it. A string is tied to one of the sparrow’s legs while the child holds the other end of the string. The sparrow flaps its wings desperately but can’t fly, and is tormented until it just closes its eyes and stops
moving, strangled by the string. You say that, as a child, you used to catch praying mantises. That jade-green body with its long, thin legs and two pincers raised like meat cleavers looks ferocious, but when children tie a fine thread to one of its legs, it tosses and turns a few times, and then falls to pieces. You ask if she’s had such experiences.

“People aren’t sparrows!” she protests.

“And, of course, they’re not praying mantises either,” you say. “Nor are they heroes, and if they can’t stand up to might and power, they can only flee.”

The room floods with darkness so thick that it seems to be in motion.

“Press close to me.” Her voice is suffused with gentleness. She’s brought you pain and she’s trying to comfort you.

Separated by her negligee, you embrace her soft body but can’t generate lust. She caresses you, and her soft hands wander over your body, bestowing her feminine kindness upon you. You say you’re mentally worked up and tense, and you close your eyes to loosen up and to feel her tenderness.

“Then talk about women,” she softly teases by your ear like a solicitous lover. “Talk about her.”

“Who?”

“That woman of yours, was her name Lin?”

You say she wasn’t your woman, she was someone else’s wife.

“Anyway, she was your lover. Did you have lots of women?”

“You should realize that in China, at that time, it was not possible to have lots of women.”

You also add that Lin was your first woman. You say this, knowing that probably she will not believe you.

“Did you love her?” she asks.

You say that it was she who seduced you and that you didn’t want to become involved in this sort of futile love.

“Do you still think about her?” she asks.

“Margarethe, why are you asking this?”

“I want to find out the status of women in your heart.”

You say she was, of course, quite lovely. She was a recent university graduate, she was very pretty, and could even be called sexy. At that time, in China, not many dressed like her, in body-hugging dresses and mini high heels; for those times, she was quite flashy. As the daughter of a high-ranking cadre, she was in a superior position, she was arrogant and willful but totally unromantic. However, you were only able to live in your books and your fantasies, your routine work was dead-boring. There were always zealots who wanted to get into the Party in order to become bureaucrats. They organized extra Mao’s
Selected Works
study groups for after work and hassled people to attend. Anyone who didn’t attend was considered ideologically unsound. It was only after nine or ten o’clock in the evening, when you got back to your room and sat at your own desk by the light of your desk lamp, that you were able to lose yourself in reverie and write your own things: that was you. In the daytime, in that world alien to yourself, you were always in a daze and always dozed off at meetings, because you would have stayed up all night. You were nicknamed “Dream,” and you even answered to “Sleepy Bug.”

“Dream is a beautiful name.” She’s chuckling, and the sound reverberates in her robust chest.

You say it was, to some extent, a camouflage, otherwise you would have been hauled out for criticism long ago.

“Did she also call you that? Did she fall in love with you just like that?” she asks.

“Maybe.”

You say of course you were fond of her, and it wasn’t just pure lust. You were very wary of women who had been to university, because they all gravitated toward the light and always tried to achieve a sort of angelic purity. You knew that your own thoughts were dark, but you had been taught a lesson by your little experience of love at university. If what you raved on about in private came to be confessed by the woman in one of the thought-report sessions set
up by the Party or the work unit, you, too, would have been put on the altar for sacrifice.

“But surely there were other women?”

“If you haven’t lived in that environment, you wouldn’t understand.”

You ask whether she would want to make love with a Nazi who might expose her Jewish background.

“Don’t mention the Nazis!”

“Sorry, but there is a similarity. They made use of the same psychology,” you explain. “Lin, of course, wasn’t like that, but she enjoyed many privileges because of her family. She didn’t try to get into the Party; her parents, her family, were the Party. She didn’t need to put on an act or go to report on her thinking to the Party secretary.”

You say the first time she invited you to a meal was in an elegant dining room that was not open to the public. To get through the door, a pass was needed. Naturally, she paid, you didn’t have a pass and didn’t have the money to pay, and felt bad about it.

“I understand,” she says softly.

You say Lin wanted you to take her husband’s military pass so the two of you could take a room in the holiday guesthouse for high-ranking cadres and their families in the Summer Palace. She said you could pose as her husband. You said what if you were found out? She said you wouldn’t be, and, if you wanted to, you could wear her husband’s uniform.

“She was brave,” she murmurs.

You say that you, however, were not, and this recklessness made you very anxious. Anyway, you made love with her. The first time was in her home. Her home was a huge courtyard complex occupied by her parents and the old doorkeeper who swept the yard and lit the stove. At night, they all went to bed early, and it was very quiet in the courtyard. It was she who initiated you into manhood, and, no matter what, you’re grateful to her.

“That means you still love her.” She props herself up on her elbows and looks at you in the dark.

“She taught me.”

You reflect about it; rather than love, it was desire for her lovely body.

“What did she teach you?”

Her hair brushes against your face, and you see the faint gleam of the whites of her large eyes looking down at you.

“She took the initiative. She had just become a married woman,” you say. “Anyway, at the time, I was over twenty and still a virgin. Don’t you think it’s hilarious?”

“Don’t say that, at that time, in China, everyone was puritanical, I understand. . . .”

Her fingers play little games on your body. You say that you were not puritanical and that you also wanted her.

“Was it because you were repressed that you wanted to indulge yourself?”

“I wanted to indulge myself with a woman’s body!” you say.

“And you also wanted a woman to indulge herself, right?” Her velvety voice is right by your ear. “Then fuck me, like you did those women of yours in China.”

“Who?”

“Lin, or that girl whose name you’ve forgotten.”

You turn and embrace her, lift her negligee, and slip into her. . . . “If you want to ejaculate, go ahead. . . .”—“Ejaculate in whose body?”—“A woman you want. . . .”—“A wanton woman?”—“Isn’t that what you want?”—“You’re a prostitute?”—“Yes.”—“Have you ever sold yourself?”—“Yes, and not just once. . . .”—“Where?”—“In Italy. . . .”—“Who did you sell yourself to?”—“Anyone who wanted. . . .”—“You’re cheap!”—“Not at all, you can’t afford me, what I want is for you to suffer. . . .”—“That’s all in the past.”—“No, it’s right by you. . . .”—“That deep place?”—“Yes.”—“It’s very deep, right inside to the end . . . maybe too deep. . . . Is that
why you’re squeezing hard, sucking?”—“You’ve ejaculated! Don’t worry. . . .”—“Aren’t you afraid?”—“Afraid of what?”—“What if you became pregnant?”—“I’d have an abortion.”—“Are you crazy?”—“You’re the one who’s afraid, you want to indulge but you don’t dare. Don’t worry, I’ve taken something.”—“When?”—“In the bathroom.”—“Before coming to bed?”—“Yes, I knew you would fuck me.”—“Then why did you torment me for so long?”—“Don’t ask, if you want to, just use it . . . this body. . . .”—“The body of a prostitute?”—“I’m not a prostitute.”—“I don’t understand.”—“Don’t understand what?”—“What you said just now.”—“What did I say?”—“You said you had sold yourself.”—“It would be impossible for you to comprehend, impossible for you to understand, impossible for you to know!”—“I want to know everything about you!”—“If you want to use me, go ahead, but don’t hurt me.”—“But aren’t you a prostitute?”—“No, I’m just a woman, one who became a woman too early.”—“When?”—“When I was thirteen. . . .”—“Nonsense! Are you making it up?”

She shakes her head. You want her to tell you about it! She mutters that she doesn’t know anything and doesn’t want to know. . . . She needs to suffer and to experience ecstasy through suffering. You need women, need to ejaculate your lust and loneliness into the bodies of women. She says she pays because she, too, is lonely and longs for understanding. Pays for love and enjoyment? Yes, she just wants and so she gives and also pays. And sells herself? Yes. And is wanton? And cheap! She rolls on top of you and you see her eyes glinting in the dark before you close your eyes and start calling out. . . .