At this he explained, "Don't get upset, you're not under investigation and neither is your former husband. You covered his escape, so he wasn't arrested, all that is clearly documented. What I want to find out about is the other underground Party member. He was later arrested, had nothing to do with you, but was put in the same prison. How did he get out? According to his statement, the Party organization saved him. Could you tell me something about the situation?"
"I've already told you, I was not a Party member, so don't ask me whether or not the Party saved him."
"I'm asking about the situation in the prison. For example, when a person was released, were certain procedures adopted?"
"Why don't you go and ask the guards at the prison? Go and ask the Nationalist Party! I was a woman locked in a big prison while still nursing a baby at my breast!"
The woman lost her temper and started banging the table like an old village woman in a fit of rage.
Of course, he, too, could have lost his temper. At the time, the relationship between an investigator and a person being investigated was like an interrogation: like between a judge and the accused, or even between a warden and the prisoner. However, he forced himself to say calmly that he had not come to investigate how she came to be released. He was asking her to provide information on general procedures at the prison. For example, were there special procedures for the release of political prisoners?
"I was not a political prisoner!" the woman said categorically.
He said he was willing to believe that she was not a member of the Party and that she had been implicated because of her husband, he believed all this. But he did not want to, and there was no need for him to, have difficulties with her. However, since he had come to carry out an investigation, he asked her to make a statement.
"If you don't know anything about it, then just write that you don't know. I'm sorry I've disturbed you, and the investigation will finish here." He first made this quite clear.
"I can't write anything," the woman said.
"Weren't you a teacher? And, it seems, that you also went to university."
"There's nothing to write." She refused.
In other words, she was not willing to leave any documentation about that part of her life. It was because she did not want people to know her background that she had hidden herself in this village to spend the rest of her days with a peasant shadow-play singer, he thought.
"Have you ever tried to see him?" He was asking about her former husband, the high official.
The woman declined to comment.
"Does he know you're still alive?"
The woman remained silent and made no response. He could do nothing more, so he capped his pen and put it into his pocket.
"When did your child die?" he asked as a matter of course, as he got up.
"In prison, it was just one month old…" The old woman abruptly stopped and also got up from the bench.
He did not pursue the matter, and put on his padded gloves. The old woman silently escorted him out the door. He nodded his head to her in farewell.
When he got to the dirt road with two deep wheel ruts and looked back, the old woman was still standing at the door, without her scarf. Seeing him turn, she went back inside the house.
On his way back, the wind changed; this time it blew in from the northeast. It began snowing more and more heavily, so that, with the grain harvested, everything became a vast bare plain. The snowflakes filling the sky came straight at him, and it was hard to keep his eyes open, but he got back to the cart station before dark and collected the rented bicycle he had left there. Although he didn't have to get back to the county town that night, for some reason, he quickly got on the bicycle. The dirt road and the fields were blanketed in thick snow, and he could barely make out the road. The wind blew from behind, sweeping the snow in all directions, but, at least, it was blowing in the right direction. Gripping the handlebars tightly, he bounced up and down in the snow-covered ruts of the road. From time to time, the bicycle and the rider would fall into the snow, but he would pick himself up and get back on the bicycle to continue on, unsteadily. Lashed up by the wind, it was all swirling snow before him, everything was a vast expanse of gray…
35
"You clown!" the former lieutenant colonel rebuked him, but he was now the favorite of the Army Control Commission. He was also the deputy leader of the team in charge of purifying class ranks, although, of course, army personnel were actually in charge.
You really were a clown. You were a bean made to jump helplessly in the all-embracing sieve of the totalitarian dictatorship, but you didn't jump out of the sieve, because you didn't want to get smashed up.
You had to welcome being controlled by army personnel, just like you had to take part in the parades to cheer each of Mao's latest string of directives released on the radio news at night. As soon as the slogans had been written, people assembled, formed ranks, and be gan marching on the streets, usually until midnight. To gongs and drums and the shouting of slogans, one contingent after another marched across Chang'an Avenue from the west, as one contingent after another marched across from the east, each on parade for the other. You had also to be enthusiastic and not let others see that you were worried.
You certainly were a clown, otherwise you would have been "dog shit, less than human." Those were Old Man Mao's own words of warning, to draw a line of demarcation between the people and the enemy. Faced with choosing between being dog shit and being a clown, you chose to be a clown. You loudly sang the army song, "Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention." Like a soldier, you stood to attention before the portrait of the Commander-in-Chief that hung in the middle of the main wall of every office, and, holding high a red plastic-covered copy of Mao's Sayings, you shouted "long live" three times. After the implementation of army control, all this was compulsory daily ritual at the start and finish of work. It was called "seeking instructions in the morning" and "reporting at night."
At such times, you had to be careful not to laugh! Otherwise there would have been dire consequences, unless you were prepared to be a counterrevolutionary and hoped that at some future date you'd become a martyr. The former lieutenant colonel was absolutely correct, he was a clown, but he didn't dare to laugh. It is only you of the present, who recalling those times, can laugh, although you find that you can't.
He was the representative of a group of people's organizations in a ferret-out team controlled by army personnel. When that group of masses and cadres chose him, he knew that his judgment day had come. However, the masses and cadres of the group that looked to him for support did not know that that single item in his file, his father's having "hidden a gun," could see him purged from that one big revolutionary family.
At the meeting of the ferret-out team, Officer Zhang read aloud an "internal control" list-that is, a list of persons on whom internal control was to be carried out. This was the first time he had heard the term, and it gave him a shock. The "internal control" was not directed only at ordinary workers, but included certain Party cadres. The ferreting-out was to start with "bad people" who had infiltrated people's organizations. This was no longer the Red Guard violence of two years ago, or the armed fighting between factions of people's organizations. It was now leisurely, and directed by army personnel, and, like a strategic plan of war, it was planned, coordinated, and fought in stages. The Army Control Commission had removed the seals from the personnel files, and in front of Officer Zhang were piles of materials on people with "problems."