Can't a person's faith change? Once aboard the Party ship, does it have to be for the whole of a person's life? Is it possible not to be a loyal subject of the Party? Then what if one has no faith? By jumping out of the rigid choice of being either one or the other, you will be without an ideology, but will you be allowed to exist? When your mother gave birth to you, you did not have an ideology. You, the last in a generation of a doomed family, can't you live outside ideology? Is not to be revolutionary the same as counterrevolutionary? Is not to be a hatchet man for the revolution the same as being a victim of the revolution? If you don't die for the revolution, will you still have the right to exist? And how will you be able to escape from the shadow of revolution?
Amen. You were born with sin and unqualified to be a judge, but, cynically and for your own self-protection, you infiltrated the rebel ranks. At this very time, you are even more certain of this. It is also to find a refuge that, on the pretext of investigating Party cadres, you get a wad of letters of introduction stamped with official seals, draw a sum of money for expenses, and go off wandering everywhere. There's no harm in getting to learn a bit about this inexplicable world and seeing if there's anywhere to escape this catastrophic revolution.
On the southern bank of the Yellow River, in the city of Ji'nan, he found a small workshop on an ancient street. The person he was investigating had been released from a prison farm. The middle-aged woman supervisor wearing sleeve protectors was pasting up paper boxes. She replied, "The person's been gone a long time."
"Is he dead?" he said.
"If he's gone, of course he's dead."
"How did he die?"
"Go and ask his family!"
"Is his family still here? Who are they?"
"Who, in fact, are you investigating?" the woman asked back.
He couldn't say to some woman worker in a workshop that opened onto the street that the dead person and the cadre under investigation had been classmates at university and had joined the student movement of the underground Party organization, and afterward they had been in a Nationalist prison together. Also, there was no point in wearing himself out trying to explain all this cast-iron revolutionary logic. But he did have to get hold of a document saying that the person was dead, so that he could claim his travel expenses.
"Would you be able to put your seal on it?" he asked.
"Put my seal on what?"
"A testimony that the person's dead."
"You'll have to go to the public security supply office. We don't issue death certificates."
"All right. Which way do I have to go to get to the Yellow River?" he asked, imitating the woman's Shandong accent.
"What Yellow River?" the woman asked.
"Our China has only one Yellow River. Isn't your Ji'nan city on the bank of the Yellow River?"
"What are you talking about! What's to see there? I've never been there."
The woman went back to pasting her paper boxes and ignored him.
There was a saying that a person should not give up before reaching the Yellow River, and he suddenly thought of going to see it. The Yellow River had been eulogized from ancient times, and he had passed over it many times, but always in a train, and its greatness could not be seen as it flashed by through the metal framework of the bridge. A passer-by on the street told him that the Yellow River was a long way off, he would have to take a bus to Luokouzhen, then walk up the high embankment. It was only from the top of the embankment that the river could be seen.
When he climbed to the top of the high embankment of bare loess, there was no sign of anything green. On the other shore was a dusty flood area without any villages and not a single shrub. A rolling sludge lay below the fractures and slopes formed by silting at different water levels. The riverbed was high above the town. Was this fast-flowing, brown, muddy river the Yellow River that had been praised in songs over the ages? Did the ancient civilization of China originate here?
Below the horizon, as far as the eye could see, was the muddy river speckled with dazzling sunlight. But for the black shadow of a boat floating in the distance under the sun, there was absolutely no sign of life. Had the people who had sung its praises ever actually come to the Yellow River? Or had they simply made it all up?
That distant shadow against the sky, the sailing boat with a wooden mast, swayed as it neared. The gray-white sail had big patches, and a man, stripped to the waist, was holding the rudder. A woman in a gray jacket was also on the deck, throwing something overboard. The rocks in the cabin, which filled half of the boat, were probably used for mending breaks in the embankment during seasonal flooding.
He went down to the shore. It gradually became slushy mud, so he took off his shoes and socks and held them as he walked barefoot in the slippery quagmire. He bent down and scooped a handful of mud that dried in the sun into the shape of a shell. A revolutionary poet once sang: "I drink the water of the Yellow River." But this muddy soup was not for humans, and even fish and shrimp would find it hard to survive in it. It would seem that dire poverty and disaster can be eulogized. This great muddy river, which was virtually dead, shocked him and filled him with desolation. Some years later, an important member of the Party Center said he wanted to erect a great statue to honor the spirit of the nation in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and probably it has already been erected.
The train south made an unscheduled stop during the night at a small station on the northern bank of the Yangtze River, and people were shut in the unbearably hot and stuffy carriages. The ceiling fans were whirring, but the rank odor of sweat made it even harder to breathe. Several hours passed like this. The explanation over the broadcast system was that there was armed fighting at a station up ahead. The tracks were piled with rocks, and they didn't know when the train would be able to go through. It was only after passengers surrounded the train guard to protest that the doors were opened and everyone got out. He went to a pond by a paddy field, washed himself, then lay on the embankment to look at the stars in the sky. The sound of angry voices died down, and, as the croaking of frogs filled the air, he began to doze off. He thought back to when he was a child and lay on a bamboo bed in the courtyard to stay cool, and had also looked at the sky like this. But those childhood memories were more remote than the bright morning star in the sky.
30
Bags of cement had been stacked waist-high across the road, with gaps left to poke rifles through. In front of the barricade was a mass of road construction equipment: roadblocks, cement mixers, and bitumen boilers. Concrete blocks strung with barbed wire had been put up to make a passage on the road just wide enough for a person to get through. Traffic had been cut, and a line of seven or eight empty electric trolleybuses with their cable rods removed stood on one side of the intersection. The footpaths, however, were crowded with pedestrians and nearby residents: young adolescents squeezing in and out, women with babies, and old men in singlets and slippers waving rattan fans. They were all standing against the iron railing of the footpath waiting to watch something happen. Were they waiting for an armed battle? There was much talk in the crowd, some were talking about the Red Command and others about the Revolutionary Command. Anyway, the two factions had mobilized their forces and there was going to be a fight. He couldn't work out which faction was in control of the road to the railway station, but, making his way through the crowd, he crossed the intersection and started walking toward the roadblock.