When you wake up, the lights are on, and people are quickly getting up and leaving. You come out of the theater, hail a cab, and return to the hotel. When the woman at reception hands you the key, there are two telephone messages for you, to return calls. They are probably for dinner appointments, but at night, you have a farewell dinner with the actors and you can't go off somewhere else.Back in your tidy room, there are no items of her clothing on the bed, floor, or desk; it is as if a woman had not stayed here with you. You can't help feeling sad, and lie down fully clothed on the bed. The freshly changed, newly laundered sheets and pillowcases smell clean, and the air conditioner is humming. Not a sign of her or a trace of her smell remains, and, unfortunately, no surveillance camera to prove she had made love with you and that you had not been hallucinating.
Margarethe, you are calling out to a real woman, this is not just the sound of your inner mind. She has aroused your past, and it stands there before your eyes. She is already fused with your memories, and you can't help wanting to retrieve both your fresh and almost forgotten memories.
Right now, she is on a plane, and by tomorrow, this week will have passed. And, as she said, she will again be her boss's lover, and, as she had with you, she will make love with her boss. You have already fallen in love with this sadomasochistic prostitute and can't help thinking of her, her moistness and smell, which arouse your lust. Was she telling the truth when she said she had been raped at thirteen, or was that a strategy of seduction? Should you just treat her as a slut? Or should you let her accompany you in your thoughts, be a companion in your heart, so that you can share with her your loneliness and suffering?
Maybe you should make up your mind to write down the memories and experiences she has summoned up, but is it worth doing? You no longer need to waste your life doing such utterly meaningless things, but then, what is meaningful? Is that play of yours, which is banned on the Mainland but has been staged here and due to go on stage again tonight, meaningful? Was it worth the suffering it brought you? If you had not written that play, wouldn't your life have been much easier? Why, then, do you write?
If it is only through expressing yourself that you exist, then is that the reason for your existence? Does this then mean that you are a book-writing machine, driven by vanity to squander away your life? Perhaps she is right, just sink into carnal lust so that you can savor the pain. Since it is impossible to extricate yourself from it, simply sink into it. What need is there for you to promote morality, and where, in fact, can morality be found? That you are no match for the world and can only take refuge in the written word for a little solace and joy is like Margarethe's telling you about her suffering in order to exorcise it, even though doing this is unbearable.
You take a hot bath, then a cold shower, and feel refreshed. You must return to reality by going to see the final performance of your play. With the young actors, you will eat, drink, joke, make lofty pronouncements about human beings, then leave them with the perplexities of being human.
17
It was a tailor-made new society, brand new and shiny, in which everyone was a glorious worker. People were organized into work units so that they could serve the people, even the barefoot peasants who worked in the fields and the bathhouse workers who pared the calluses from people's feet. Outstanding workers were selected as model workers and commended in the newspapers. There were no idlers, begging and prostitution were banned, and grain was allocated according to the number of mouths to be fed so that not a single bowl of rice would be wasted. The sense of personal gain was eradicated and everyone relied upon a wage or salary. Everything was the shared property of society, including the workers who were rigorously managed so that they would be perfect. There was no escape for the bad, and those not executed were sent to prison or to a farm to be reformed through labor. Red flags fluttered everywhere and, although it was only the first stage, a human ideal of a heavenly kingdom had come into being.
New people were also created. A perfect model, an ordinary soldier called Lei Feng, who grew up as an orphan under the five-star red flag not knowing what it was to be an individual, selflessly saved others and sacrificed his own life. When this hero of few desires first learned to read, he felt boundless gratitude to the Party for being able to read the Selected Works of Mao Zedong and to write about it. Lei Feng was willing to be a bright, shiny cog in the machinery of the revolution so that citizens could model themselves on him. And everyone had to do just that. He was dubious about this type of new people, but the confession system at the university required that everyone confess their thoughts to the Party. One's own thoughts and those of others, including one's doubts, all had to be reported at special summing-up meetings. He was tricked and frivolously asked if one could be a hero without having to throw oneself on a bag of explosives and getting blown up, and wasn't the function of the engine more important than that of a cog. This instantly sent his fellow students into an uproar, the women students making the loudest protests. He was criticized, luckily only at a class discussion, so it was not too serious. However, he had been taught a sound lesson: a person had to lie. If one wanted only to tell the truth, then there was no point living. It was fundamentally impossible for a person to be pure, but it was only many years later that he was able to comprehend this. He was able to learn through other people's and his own experiences, but only after having personally verified the experiences of others and suffering as a consequence.
You now do not need to take part in compulsory study meetings to confess your words and actions, and you no longer have to repent. You also distance yourself from any new myths that are similar to those. However, at that time he was frustrated and needed to talk about how he felt, so he arranged a get-together with some old schoolmates who were in Beijing and studying at university. They met at the Purple Bamboo Courtyard Park in the western suburbs. From different universities, luckily, they were not directly linked in an association, but only did a bit of writing when they felt deeply moved. All of them had written things like poetry, and simply wanted to come out of the intellectual shackles of the campus to relax. The park had only recently opened to the public and was fairly deserted. A teahouse by the lake sold cakes, but those poor students could not afford to go inside to sit down. However, on the grass in the shade of the trees, farther off, there were some quiet spots without any people. The fresh smell of wheat wafted on the breeze from the fields above the earth embankment, so probably it was May, because the grain was ripe.
Big Head said he wanted to write a play like Mayakovski's Bath-house. He was nicknamed Big Head, because he had won the first prize in a mathematics competition for all middle-school students in Beijing, and also because the cap he wore in winter was two sizes bigger than that of anyone else. Big Head, fortunately, went back to his mathematics and didn't write about any bathhouses or mud baths. However, as two of his articles had been published, in English, in an international students' mathematics journal just before that anticulture Cultural Revolution broke out, he was sent for eight years to herd cattle on a farm. Big Head's problem was not the result of that get-together in the park but came about after he had graduated. He made a flippant comment in the dormitory of his research institute and was reported by a colleague.
It was the reedy Mandarin Jacket Cheng, who got in trouble on that occasion. His nickname came from middle-school days, when he used to wear his father's old clothes that were several sizes too big for his skinny body. Without his knowledge, a fellow student read Cheng's diary and reported it to the secretary of the Communist Youth League. Mandarin Jacket was the only one of their group who had somehow weaseled membership into the League. The diary had a note on their get-together, but had not recorded what they had talked about. Cheng got in trouble because he had written about Women in the diary. It was said to have been pornographic and lewd, but it wasn't clear if the women were figments of his imagination or real. When people from Cheng's university arrived to question him about Cheng, he broke out in cold sweat.