Back in 1962, the third of the famine years, when she was nine years old, Tianyi spoke out in favour of her grandfather. Her mother always favoured Tianke, she said. She, Tianyi, had become a sort of Cinderella, she said. Were there really such old-fashioned folks in the countryside who paid no attention to a mere girl? She asked.
Tianyi’s grandfather’s arrival put a stop to her obsession with The Story of the Stone, and made her feel suddenly that she was not only clever but should not hide her gifts. When he left, taking with him Tianyi’s ‘Parrot Girl’ painting, it was very clear that although he had come to claim his grandson, it was his granddaughter that had brought him comfort.
However, the insomnia triggered by The Story of the Stone persisted, and had disastrous and enduring consequences. Many years later, Tianyi reflected on her own marriage and realized that it was sleeping in different beds that put paid to a marriage. After that, there was no going back. It was one thing to share a bed but have different dreams, quite another to dream in different beds. That was the true end of a marriage.
She could never forget the morning after their wedding day, the frantic hammering on the door, the loud yell, startling the couple awake. It took a while for Tianyi to work out that her mother-in-law was shouting her son’s name, ‘Lian! Lian!’ as if he was being kidnapped or murdered. She was not just startled, she was very annoyed. What peasants! But surely, even countryfolk did not act like this? People always said you should steer clear of old women widowed too young. They were so embittered by not having had a normal marriage that they would do anything to stop the rest of the world being happy!
As time went by, she was proved only too right. Lian’s grandmother did nothing but issue orders through her daughter, Tianyi’s mother-in-law. The child must absolutely not have its own cot, it absolutely must sleep either with father or mother, it must be breastfed round the clock … in short, the two women did everything in their power to prevent husband and wife sharing the same bed. Tianyi privately considered it amusing. What on earth good did it do them?
Thinking back on it, Tianyi realized how naïve she had been. If she had her time again, she would have paid no attention to the pair, she would have talked and smiled with them but completely ignored their injunctions. She would have treated them like so much hot air. Her failure, she felt, lay in being too honest. If she looked at the people around her, no one remembered the honest ones, they were here today, gone tomorrow. People did what they wanted nowadays, only a fool would put any value on honesty in this fast-moving, materialistic age.
The old women’s strategy must have been effective. Tianyi fell pregnant on the night her marriage was consummated and, as soon as she found out, did not dare share a bed with Lian, thus quenching his ardour. Once the baby was born, they only had sex once more, and she fell pregnant again. After that they kept to separate beds, right up until they separated. Of course, when Niuniu was still a baby, Lian would burrow into Tianyi’s bed for some cuddles while the baby was asleep, but the occasions on which they had full sex grew fewer and fewer. On the odd occasion it happened, Tianyi realized her husband was increasingly unenthusiastic. She, however, was just the opposite. It seemed that childbirth had lit a flame in her that could only be quenched by sex. Tianyi began to feel as if she was on fire. Very soon the flames would consume her until only ashes were left.
It was not that she had not thought of finding a lover. For instance, if Xiao’ou had taken the initiative, she would not have turned him down. The trouble was, a man like Xiao’ou was not in the habit of taking the initiative and, even if he did, it would have taken someone cleverer and more sexually experienced than her to take him up on it.
Tianyi was in torment. The best way of sublimating her desires was to scribble stories. Sublimation was not a new idea by any means: Freud had talked of sublimation too. So Tianyi wrote as if she was giving birth to another baby. During this period, she wrote so many articles that, years later when she looked back at them, she was astonished. In this era of family planning, when men were not like men nor women like women, a woman like her, brimming with vitality but deprived both of sex and of giving birth, could only throw herself into writing reams of articles, covering sheet after sheet of paper. They were beautiful pieces. If she had been able to transform them into children, they would have been beautiful children, but what good was beauty? Tianyi had always put too much value on other people’s tastes, and readers’ tastes ran in the direction of crude writing and vulgar content, not her sort of work, never mind that every word contained pearls of wisdom.
No matter. Tianyi could put up with the slights, because she was in love, wholly and completely in love — with the mysterious H Z.
12
The Tree of Knowledge won a major prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Karlovy Vary was a town in the south of the Czech Republic. Ten years later, Tianyi was lucky enough to visit it, and it took her breath away. It was as pretty as a child’s picture book. It was autumn and the entire city was gilded by autumnal foliage that blazed and shimmered in the breeze. A building in the distance looked like it had been built from a child’s wooden bricks. Near that building, she found and bought a set of gilded crystal wine glasses.
At the time of the festival, however, she knew nothing of Karlovy Vary. Though she had heard its name, she did not have a clue as to where it was and even had a vague idea it was in Africa.
The Tree of Knowledge was only shown in China after it had won the prize. On the opening night, the deputy director had a number of complimentary tickets, and the first person she thought to invite was her H Z.
There was no real mystery about who H Z was, it was just her abbreviation for Hua Zheng. In Tianyi’s eyes Zheng was a beautiful and dangerous man, especially beautiful precisely because he was dangerous. She first met him at the beginning of the 1980s, in the house of a friend. He was a formidable figure back then, with eyes that blazed so bright you could not see the pupils. Her friend Peng introduced them, saying with a laugh: ‘Tianyi, we all know you writers are fascinated by Che Guevara. Well, here he is in a modern guise. Have a good talk.’ Peng was given to hyperbole, but this time he was not exaggerating. Zheng and Tianyi hit it off straightaway and talked non-stop for seven hours. Peng had to bustle around and do the dinner without any help from them, but he did not grumble. He provided a good spread too: scrambled eggs, stir-fried cabbage, a dish of potato, aubergine and green pepper, stir-fried shredded pork, beancurd and mushroom casserole, and a sour and hot soup. But even eating could not stop the chatterers’ mouths, as Zheng and Tianyi talked on and on. Tianyi discovered that this lovable, boyish man liked nothing better than a good argument. He could not seem to help it: if you said east, he said west, and if you agreed west, he immediately changed his mind to south. Tianyi felt he was being argumentative for the sake of it, but Zheng defended himself: ‘A lot of the time, I try and start an argument because, when people argue, it livens up their thought processes.’
Tianyi heard it from Zheng first: ‘Mao Zedong is not a Marxist, he’s a peasant revolutionary imbued with a feudal king’s thinking.’ At the beginning of the 1980s, this was a risky thing to say, but to Tianyi’s surprise, she realized that these words clarified her innermost feelings.