They’d talked till dawn, that strange summer night, discussing subjects that had probably never been debated before since the world began. “Anything that might encourage love must be abolished,” she murmured. “Women’s shoes, jewellery, dresses, hair-dressing…” “But we’ve done that already, practically!” he answered. “Such extravagances haven’t existed in China for a long time.” “Not in China, perhaps,” she complained, “but we must look much further — the rest of the world is full of them!”
Then she suddenly stood up and went into another room, After a while she came back wearing a uniform that was half military and half more like that of a prison warder. For a moment he had to shut his eyes: he couldn’t stand the sight of her got up like that, with that wretched cap covering her sparse hair, those trousers clinging to her body — it was horrible, as if there were nothing left of her, not even the bones. He was well aware why she adopted his ideas on the reform of mankind so eagerly, but seeing her like this he realized she would go on trying to translate that dream into reality until she died. “From now on,” she whispered, “I shall dress like this not only when I’m with you, nor even just at meetings of the Politbureau, but everywhere — in public, at the big parades in Tienanmen Square, and even at official receptions, under the very noses of the foreigners.” Her words convinced him that if her sacrifice was going to be complete, the reward she expected would be no less so. I must be careful, he thought: this woman is consumed with ambition. But she shall have her reward! He couldn’t remember very clearly now what he’d actually said at the time, nor even what he’d thought. No doubt he’d made a few half-joking, half-serious remarks: “As you faded, so beauty too faded from the world;” “the world must mourn for your lost youth;” “it’s not you, but the world, that has grown old” — that sort of thing. And: “I once heard of a book about a young man whose face remained unchanged, while the effects of time could be seen only in his portrait…Someone must pay for the passing of your youth, Jiang Qing. All the women in China aren’t enough for you? I knew you’d say that! Very well, let all the women in the world pay, then!”
He reminded her that some women in Europe thought as she did.
She listened eagerly, feverishly. “Some women,” he said, “have lost no time in adopting my ideas, even in the heart of Europe, in Paris — people call them Maoists. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”
“Of course,” she answered, “but there aren’t very many of them — just a drop in the ocean. What a task it will be to change all the others! Perhaps it would be a good idea to start with the women in Albania? The alliance between our two countries would make things easier.”
“Yes, you’re right,” he answered. “That’s what we’ll do. The Albanian women will be the first ones in Europe to be de-feminized. I’m told they managed to throw off the veil after being forced by Islam to wear it for five hundred years. But we are much stronger than Islam!”
As dawn approached, their conversation grew more and more incoherent: sometimes he would nod off, sometimes she sounded as if she were talking in a waking nightmare. She would get into a rage, then a moment later be overcome by an icy wave of doubt. “Unsex all white women, master!” she cried out once as in a dream. Thee became cast down again at the thought of how long it would take. She was afraid everything would peter out when he died. She feared he himself might not be determined enough. He reassured her as best he could. “Don’t worry! Once we get the thing started there’ll be no stopping it,” If it hadn’t still been ie the future, he might have quoted the example of Cambodia: “Look at Cambodia — it started there with hatred of culture and ended up with hatred of everything else. Now they’re even allergic to buildings in their cities!” As it was, he just had to listen to her breathless fretting: “What if this? Supposing that?”
It was getting light when he started talking about marihuana. Perhaps the rosy gleams of dawn made him think of it. Perhaps he thought it was time to put an end to her ravings. At any rate, he suddenly heaved a sigh and said: “There’s another way I can achieve my ends.” Then he told her of what his enemies called the latest bee in his bonnet — his marihuana plan.
“When I gave orders for farmers to start growing it, a couple of months ago, everyone thought it was for the four or five billion dollars it might bring in. The idiots! My reasons were quite different…”
She listened open-mouthed.
“I’d have told you about it before,” he said, “but I was waiting for an opportunity like tonight.”
Then he rambled on about the waves of red that would eventually spread out over the whole earth like-ripples on a pond, and about the hallucinations that would fill all those gradually softening brains. A few years’ addiction to the drug brought about a weakening of the mind, while a few years more produced further deterioration, and so on until the persons concerned had lost about half of their mental faculties.
“And that’s the key to the whole thing,” he murmured. “That’s what will make all the rest quite easy — do you see?”
And so they began a new day, hovering between sleep and waking. All that was needed was the hoot of an owl to complete Jiang Qing’s resemblance to Lady Macbeth, as there lay in the next room, with their throats cut, Shakespeare, the Ninth Symphony, the Mona Lisa, and all the drunken governments who, like King Duncan’s drugged grooms, woke too late to prevent the murder…
Mao Zedong took a deep breath as if to drive away the memory of that night. Some time had gone by since then, and what had once been a dream had long since turned into fact. So much so that foreigners had begun to smell a rat. He froze again, thinking he heard the sound of another plane. But when he looked up the sky was empty except for clouds dotted here and there, as before. I must have been dreaming, he thought. Then, a moment later, growled: “They sniff around my marihuana like a pack of hyenas.” But let them fly as low as they liked, let them take photographs, make films, even analyse samples of soil, they would never guess his ultimate object. Their minds are too stale too discover our secrets, he told himself. Even Marx couldn’t have done so, explaining everything in terms of economics and politics as if that were all! He’d have like to remind Marx of Genghis Khan — there’d been no economics or politics, no profits or surpluses, in his tide of conquest: only violence, annihilation, the grinding of everything to dust. How do you explain that, eh, Herr Marx? Your mind can’t cope with our Asian ardours. That’s why you were doomed never to succeed with us.
He realized his thoughts were becoming confused. Europe, marihuana, the need to strengthen the dose again — the various ideas were not combining into any sort of order. “Mari-hua-na,” he mumbled. “Mao-mari-huana.” He laughed. “The thoughts of Maorihuana! Laugh, the rest of you! You’ll still be the first to come crawling to me for mercy! Ave Mao-Maria!” And he laughed to himself again. But this time it was more like a sneer.
They’d say he was raving. It was a word they were very fond of. They were always in a hurry to stick labels on any ideas their sluggish minds couldn’t understand, any concepts a bit larger than what they were used to. “Cosmic ravings” indeed! Of course, if someone’s mind isn’t capable of standing back and regarding the world impartially, everything strikes him as crazy. But his mind was capable. He could stand a thousand yards back from the world and examine it closely, even though he was only a tiny particle compared with the whole cosmos. Not for nothing was he the spiritual leader of a billion men. It was this multitude that conferred on its guide the power of seeing the world in its true proportions. You had only to look at it properly to see a tiny globule revolving in the heavens like millions of others, inhabited by at most four or five human beings: one white, one yellow, one red and one black. The white is physically the strongest, with a well-nourished brain that enables him to dominate the other three. These submit to him because they have neither the physical nor the mental strength to oppose him. And so the days (the centuries) go by, until the yellow man happens to discover a plant, which he slyly boils and gives to the white man to drink. The white man swallows it, has sweet dreams, and his mind is weakened. He goes on drinking the potion for years. And then comes the day (the century) when the yellow man, seeing the white man at the end of his tether, seizes the opportunity to wrest his power from him, Now, thinks he, it’s my turn to rule the world. What a pity it’s not a bit bigger!