"Revenge? Compensation? Is that what you want?" You say this to mock her, this must be what she wants.
"No, don't think so badly of me…" Her voice suddenly seems to be wrapped in a layer of downy feathers. "You're very gentle," she says with sadness in her voice. "You're an idealist, you're still living in dreams, your own dreams."
You say no. You only live in this instant of time, you no longer believe in lies about the future. You need to be able to live in reality.
"Have you never used violence on a woman?"
You think for a while, then say no. Of course, sex and violence are inevitably linked, but that's another matter. The other party has to be willing and accepting. You have never raped anyone. You ask her whether the men she has had were rough.
"Not necessarily… It's best if you talked about something else."
She turns away and leans on the pillow. You can't see her expression. You say that you have experienced the feeling of being raped, of being raped by the political authorities, and it has clogged up your heart. You can understand her, and can understand the anxiety, frustration, and oppression that she can't rid herself of. Rape is not a sex game. It was the same for you, and it was only long afterward, after obtaining the freedom to speak out, that you realized it had been a form of rape. You had been subjected to the will of others, had to make confessions, had to say what others wanted you to say. It was crucial to protect your inner mind, your faith in your inner mind, otherwise you would have been crushed.
"I'm terribly lonely," she says.
You say you understand her, want to go over to comfort her, but are afraid she might wrongly think that you just want to use her.
"No, you don't understand, it's impossible for a man to understand…" Her voice is tinged with sadness.
You can't help saying that you love her, that, at least at this instant in time, you have really fallen in love with her.
"Don't say that it is love. It's so easy saying it, every man can blurt it out."
"Then what shall I say?"
"Say whatever you like…"
"What if I say you're a prostitute?" you ask.
"Who craves excitement and carnal lust?" she says miserably.
She says she is not a sex object. She hopes she will live in your heart, genuinely communicate with your inner heart, and not simply be used by you. She knows that it's hard, almost futile, but she still hopes that it will be like this.
15
He recalled that, as a youngster, he once read a fairy tale, the author and tide of which he had since forgotten. The story went like this: there was this kingdom, where everyone wore a bright mirror on the chest, and the smallest wicked thought would reflect in the mirror. Everything was revealed, and everyone could see it, so no one dared to be even slightly wicked, because there would be nowhere to hide, and the person would be driven from the kingdom. It therefore became a kingdom of pure people. The protagonist entered this kingdom of ultimate purity, maybe he stumbled upon it-he didn't remember too clearly. Anyway, the protagonist also had a mirror on his chest, but in it was a flesh-and- blood heart. An outcry went up among the masses-he was terrified when he read this. He could not remember what happened to the protagonist, but the story left him feeling shocked and uneasy. At the time, he was still a child and did not have any really wicked thoughts, but he couldn't help feeling scared, although of what, he had no idea. As he became an adult, such feelings gradually paled into oblivion; he already had hopes of becoming a new person and, moreover, of living a peaceful life in which he would be able to sleep soundly, without nightmares.
The first to talk to him about women was his schoolmate Luo, a precocious boy who was a few years older. While Luo was a senior in middle school, several of his poems had been published in a magazine, earning him the title of poet among his classmates. He greatly admired Luo. However, after failing the university entrance exams, Luo worked off his frustration by going alone to the school basketball court. There, he would strip to the waist and, sweating all over in the hot summer sun, jump and shoot baskets. Luo didn't seem to be upset about failing and said he was off to fish in the Zhoushan Archipelago. This convinced him that Luo was a born poet.
Some years later, when he went home for the summer vacation, he saw Luo in a white apron selling bean curd at a vegetable market near his home. Luo gave a wan smile when he caught sight of him, and, taking off his apron, got the plump elderly woman who sold vegetables to take care of his bean-curd stall. As they went off together, Luo told him that he had been a fisherman for two years, but when he came back he couldn't find work. Finally, the subdistrict office assigned him to the cooperative vegetable stall to sell bean curd and to look after the accounts.
Luo would count as a genuine slum-dweller. His shanty, a structure of broken bricks and woven bamboo with a coat of mortar, was divided into an inner and an outer room. His mother slept in the inner room, and the outer room served as the main room and kitchen. On one side of the shanty, Luo had extended the roof and put together some sheets of pressed asbestos to build himself another room. In the far corner, where one couldn't stand up straight, stood a collapsible canvas bed and a small desk with a drawer; against the wall on the other side was a rattan bookcase. Everything was meticulously tidy and clean. Although Luo's mother was at work in the factory, Luo took him into this room the size of a chicken coop instead of the main room of the shanty, and got him to sit at the desk while he himself sat on the canvas bed.
"Do you still write poetry?" he asked.
Luo pulled out the drawer and took out a diary. It contained neatly written poems, each clearly dated.
"Are these all love poems?" he asked, leafing through the pages. He had not thought that this big fellow who was always a loner at school wrote lyrical poetry like this. He still remembered the old literature teacher reading out lines from Luo's poems in composition classes, and he said to Luo that these love poems were totally different from those early poems, which were filled with impassioned youthful determination.
"Those poems were like that so that they'd get published, but now even those poems wouldn't get published. These poems here were written for that little slut," Luo said, and started talking about women. "That little slut was just having a bit of fun with me. She had found herself a cadre who was more than ten years her senior and was waiting to get the marriage registered. She used to stay up all night knitting pullovers for that man. I got this book of poems back from her and I don't write anymore."
He thought it was best to get off the topic of women and started talking to Luo about literature. He said that the new life of the new era should have a new literature, but he wasn't sure what exactly this new literature of this new life would be like. However, he didn't think it could be about the good things happening to good people, like in the new folk songs of the Great Leap Forward that filled the pages of all the newspapers and magazines. He also talked about the fiction of Gladkov and Ehrenburg, and the plays of Mayakovski and Brecht. At the time, he wasn't aware of the purges of counterrevolutionaries by Stalin, Ehrenburg's Thaw, or the execution of Meyerhold.
"The literature you're talking about is too far away," Luo said. "I don't know where you will find any literature. I spend my time selling vegetables during the day, then, at night, after all the stalls close, I do the accounts. Sometimes I read a bit, but it's all about faraway happenings, and I just read to fritter away time, get rid of the boredom. And I don't know where this new life is. The bit of pride I had as a student vanished long ago; I just find myself some girls to have a bit of fun."