László Krasznahorkai - Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens - Reportage

It’s evening again, and the goal of the journey is Zhenjiang, and now, by all appearances, they can really attribute their having come to Zhenjiang to coincidence, if coincidence exists, and if it has been the one to guide their fingers along the map, but it doesn’t exist, says László Stein to himself, and it is not coincidence that has led his fingers, as will be completely clear in a moment, because after a good hour, cutting across the Yangtze, they head into Zhenjiang, and in the dark they see the first streets and the first people, and they no longer believe in any kind of coincidence, only in an unbending, malicious, brutally just and — to them — inordinately unfriendly spirit which, in fleeing from Yangzhou, led them to this place, so they could see, after the wretchedness of Nanjing, after the disappearance without a trace of Yangzhou, that there was still farther, farther to go, that is: farther to go downward, to sink ever lower in the experience of disillusion which this time bears the name of Zhenjiang, the trading city with a population of 2 million, at the crossroads of the Grand Canal and the Yangtze, which this time is known as the place where Wang Anshi[41] was born, and where Mi Fei[42] died, and about which it is bruited that here stands the Wenzong Ge pavilion[43] where the people of bygone times, guarding their treasures with such care, kept watch over the famous collection of volumes, the Siku Quanshu .[44] An evil spirit is following them and guiding them, and, no matter what they try to do against it, the struggle is futile, Stein perceives this towards the end of the first hour, futile, he sums up — and in subdued tones! — his feelings to the interpreter: not only are they in the wrong place with their useless interest but also, since their first steps here, nothing but evident ill fortune could be their companion, and behold, they wave down an indescribably filthy taxi, and begin to hunt for a hotel, picked out earlier from some travel guide and the only one in that district designated as ‘acceptable’, an adventure in which the problem is not that the taxi driver cannot locate the hotel but, rather, that he does locate it, as the hotel — which now, in 2002, as the travel guide emphasizes, is the only acceptable choice — is unequivocally closed, and it is how it is closed that is so horrifying, standing there mutely and darkly in its assigned place, in wholly infernal abandonment: above, on the facade, the name can still be deciphered, according to which this is the Dahuangjia Jiudian, or the ‘King Hotel’, but the windows are crudely boarded up, the entrance barricaded with sheets of iron, wooden boards, plastic sheeting, as visible as the clearly hopeless attempts to break in again and again, because this barricade is already half smashed apart, and, even though you can neither see nor go in, it’s as certain as death that there is nothing inside any more, absolutely nothing which could be stolen: the building’s fate of being broken into again and again — perhaps to the point of its complete destruction — is completely senseless, yet these break-ins will occur, continuously and indefatigably; they stand there, silent, as behind their backs the taxi’s ailing engine, like the breath of a dying man, falters for short periods, they cast a glance at the infinitely indifferent face of the taxi driver and it is clear he knew that there was nothing here, that the best they could do right now would be to make themselves scarce, to leave this place today, to go back to where they came from, but if they want to, they can pester him some more, he’s in no hurry and he will take them wherever they tell him to go, and he does, to the closest hotel which is open, and they pay him two-thirds of the amount they had bargained for — which, however, was doubled in the end — so they lose out, and they gain, as here in New China most often occurs with foreigners, then they take a mangy room, which cannot be bargained down to less than 150 yuan, on the second floor of the Fenghuang Ling hotel, originally vainly conceived as glittering but where everything is penetrated with misery, and from this point on they don’t speak a word to each other, they just make an attempt at washing in the water stained with brown rust, then they give up and eat the remains of their food purchased at the bus station in Yangzhou, then they lie down on the beds, like people who have been knocked down by sheer physical exhaustion, and they sleep until next morning. The Wenzong Ge pavilion no longer exists, nor does the renowned Siku Quanshu; the house where Wang Anshi was born is completely gone, just as on Beigu Mountain,[45] not a single genuine component of the monastery remains, but this isn’t as horrifying, as they began their baneful foray into Zhenjiang, as the fact that there is no longer any sun , it’s around nine o’clock in the morning and it’s as if the sun never even rose, nine o’clock and there is darkness in Zhenjiang and in the taxi which, after the first dismaying appraisals, they take to the city’s most renowned site, to Jinshan[46] (because they would like to see for themselves if those temples — or at least some part of them — still stand on Jinshan Hill, temples which in former times almost completely covered this spot), they just stretch their necks out and they cannot believe their eyes, save that the whole thing is as if they were the ones exaggerating in their outburst of grief, because it is simply unbelievable, absurd and fairly frightening, as if there were an eclipse of the sun, a nearly total eclipse of the sun, for as the taxi writhes forward in the crushed-together mass of tiny streets, as it honks and brakes and turns and honks again and again, and it turns, and it brakes, and it goes on like this for a long time, even for an entire hour, and nothing can be seen, as they move forward at a snail’s pace in the near night-like obscurity in which however there is plenty of time for them to seek an explanation as to what this nightmare is, and of course there is an explanation, and of course, after a bit of time it becomes clear what is happening: that on the one hand — as a kind of Zhenjiang specialty — above the narrow streets, the thick foliage of trees on either side has grown into each other so densely, forming a single perfect dense roof, and in a completely unprecedented way, not allowing even the smallest of fissures and so completely closing off the view of the sky; on the other hand, this sky hardly permits any light to descend this morning; heavy, thick, threatening, storm-grey, motionless clouds loom above them and yield no clarity, they proceed through Daxi Lun and the surrounding streets, reminiscent of a thronged, chaotic rag market, perpetually open for business, they turn, they honk, they brake, they swerve around the people wandering into view. . and maybe the people are the most frightening of all, as seen from here, from the interior of the crawling taxi, as now and then a suspicious glance is cast at them from outside; this darkness at nine o’clock in the morning is completely natural to them, it means nothing, come on, what is so strange about it, what is so out of the ordinary? — these staring indifferent gazes are discharged onto them, and for that matter: Why? What’s the difference? — they read this in the people’s eyes: for it to be evening in the morning, or to see nothing, doesn’t bother them — while in this partial withdrawal of the light it is nonetheless perfectly clear: not only is this unnatural fact incapable of throwing them off but also that nothing, but nothing, in this entire godforsaken world ever could; the grimy, distrustful, morose and immovable faces convey this in their own communicative way, they are going about their business, for surely they have some kind of business to attend to, if they are going somewhere, but whether it is nine in the morning or twelve at noon, whether there is darkness or light, whether the sun has come up or not, for them, for these 2 million people here in Zhenjiang, Stein and the interpreter determine as they gaze out of the car window, there is no significance at all. Jinshan and the entire area in the north-western corner of Zhenjiang is actually an island connected to the shore by a thin strip of earth, with the Yangtze flowing around it; on the island itself are the innumerable temples from the time when the Jiangtian monastery[47] flourished, their enormous significance and widespread popularity commemorated in a proverb that can be heard even today. And yet they are not surprised when it turns out that this is no longer true, and they are not surprised by only being able to reach the entrance to Jinshan by ploughing through an enormous ocean of mud, today, on this morning bereft of sunlight — what they experience once they are inside, however, causes not surprise but something which never figured in their most bewilderingly nightmarish apparitions. Before all else, after paying the arrogantly high entrance fee, immediately to the left they stumble onto an extensive playground. Dumbfounded, they stare: yes, the first thing you see at the Jinshan monastery is a playground, a playground in which everything is made of plastic, from Snow White to Donald Duck, the entire Euro-American fairytale world is present, if one can add that never on this earth has human effort ever created such a degenerate Snow White or such a vicious Donald Duck. So, here is a playground, they establish, and they quickly cut across it, then try to make their way to Zhongleng quan, ‘First Spring under Heaven’[48] which they suspect could have the greatest chance of at least partial survival: because after having been brain-stunned by the brutal idiocy of the playground, they lose their sense of direction and contemplate whether something may have remained, and what the water from this well, considered by the one-time imperial guards to be of the most excellent qualities, could be like, and they even find, with great difficulty, the route that leads there, where the last 150 metres have to be made by boat across an artificial lake, but there is no one there, just a dilapidated rowboat tied to a plastic buoy in the shape of a lantern; but the person who would take this boat across the lake to where the spring is supposed to be is nowhere in sight; they yell, they make a racket, they try and call attention to themselves, until after a while a sullen old man emerges from somewhere out of the dim uncertainty, and, although they greet him politely, he does not return their greeting, he doesn’t speak a single word but gestures, as if he were dealing with idiots upon whom words are wasted, he gestures irritably for them to get into the boat, then he rows them across to a perfectly forlorn island; here, everything has been built to the tastes of tourists, a lifeless, repugnant garden and a few recently-slapped-together repugnant pavilions, but everything is closed, they wander around in puzzlement until they unexpectedly come upon Zhongleng quan, that is, they come upon what has become of it, because what disillusions is not even how it is surrounded by an unwieldy enclosure carved out of fake marble, or that the original quadrant has been diverged from, or that the dimensions—20 by 20—have been changed, but that the water disillusions, as it dribbles there in the basin, it is so filthy that it wouldn’t be good even for watering grass, let alone as water for making tea, for which purpose it was employed with great esteem for centuries, as the very finest water which could exist; there are air bubbles on the surface, clearly this could have been the water of the source in bygone times — but already they are turning away, they return to the banks of the island, again they begin to shout, the old man comes, again they try to greet him, at least for this second meeting, but it’s hopeless, he doesn’t reply, he just rows them back to the far shore and is visibly relieved when they disappear from view; they return — across the inexplicable playground — to the main street of the monastery grounds, and set off onto the slopes of the Jinshan. At one time, according to the descriptions, the accounts and the drawings, the temples here were magnificent, and although only a fragment of the buildings still stand, looked at from afar, they appear to be in the best of all possible conditions; as Stein and the interpreter draw closer, however, once again they are confronted with the infinite damage done by the system of reconstruction in New China, the monstrosity of crudely vulgar taste, the implacable lack of understanding and the plethora of ignoble results, so radically at odds with the refined sensibilities of the authentic Chinese spirit; more and more they fall into a kind of enraged despair which then is transformed into the deepest repugnance; as they pass through one pavilion and then another, it rapidly becomes obvious that they are not viewing a monastery, and in particular they are not viewing Jiangtian but, rather, that they have been dropped into a safari park where nothing is real, where everything has to be paid for, because here every building is new and fake, every luohan,[49] every Buddha and every bodhisattva is new and fake, and every wood join in every column and every centimetre of golden paint is new and fake, in short, the whole thing is fraudulent, so that wherever a person goes he will encounter a vendor dressed up as some kind of Buddhist priest and who in every corner of the temple buildings will try to get him to buy — aggressively and expensively — some kind of dreadful religious junk, a pearl rosary and a Buddha necklace and a paper Guanyin, buy incense, they chant in place of sutras, buy a postcard, buy a pilgrimage bag, buy a certificate stating that you were here, a big stamp on it costs 5 yuan, the little stamp costs 2 yuan, but if you don’t buy anything, that’s ok, the monks corrupted into merchants snarl at the visitor, even then please pay, pay for everything, pay for stepping over here, for stepping over there, pay because you’re looking at this or that ‘sacred’ relic, pay at the entrance, pay at the pavilions, pay and we’ll ring the gong for you once, and buy something if you’re hungry, and buy something if you’re thirsty, of course at three times the price, the main thing is that while your yuans are decreasing, ours are increasing, so that, in the end, when it is really time to escape, and they hurry towards the entrance, it occurs to them that perhaps the evil monk Fahai,[50] who lived in this monastery more than a thousand years ago, did not bring such memorable harm only to the famous married couple in the legend but that he is also doing harm today, for it is as if he had left his spirit here and ruined this place for all eternity: for a mockery is made precisely of those who make a pilgrimage here to see the Buddha and to pray to him. In vain do they again get into a taxi, in vain do they drive across the rag market, inert in the silence of the wretched alleyways, back to the north-eastern periphery of the city, and in vain do they cross with a small ferry to the island of Jiaoshan[51] — overshadowed by the presence of the virulent tourist industry — to try to find something there among the trashy amusement parks and the trashy lookout towers, to find at least one monument which might safeguard the classical past, and there they realize: this is even more painful — in the crude modernity of an entire city, the ruinous ‘preservation of tradition’ dominated by the thirst for profit, the general clearance sale, the annihilating fraudulence, the mindless commerce mired in a counterfeit eternity, in short, in the extreme moral deterioration of the Armageddon of New China, a monument which has remained intact, here on the island of Jiaoshan, is much more painful than its absence would have been; for to walk into the entrance gate of the one-time Beilin,[52] moreover with the knowledge that this too can only bring fresh disappointment, to walk in and to look around the gardens and to begin to stroll, seeking the inscriptions of the stone tablets built into the walls, to walk in here and to comprehend just what kind of treasure they have happened upon immediately gives rise to the greatest anxiety within them — because how long can this last, the interpreter asks, how long until the absolute commercialization, the absolute debasement in this treacherous storm, he looks, plunged into anxiety, at the immortal inscriptions on the simple, well-maintained, whitewashed limestone walls, to which of course what else can Stein do except remain silent, silent in agreement, because what is going through his head is this: it cannot last even for a moment, this is the last day, the last hour, because the spirit of the age will immediately appear at the entrance gate, and will immediately begin the ruinous process of making this place earn its keep, and it is really much more grievous to see that it has remained, this monumental ensemble of gardens, this magnificent museum of classical calligraphy carved into stone, than to resign oneself to its absence, or to its renovation according to the criteria of the spirit of New China, and it is hard to explain why they should rejoice and not grieve that it is here, they say to each other, and just what kind of absurd figures are we in this entire escapade, for days now, for the entire week we have been searching for what might have survived from what is, to us, the only living precious order of Chinese classical culture, we set off in the entirely unfounded belief towards the traditional centres of high culture, south of the Yangtze, because we believed the original spirit of China to be alive somewhere, in the depths , as our European friend, Yang Lian, formulated it, and when we happen to find a piece of it — as we have right now — we weep for the fact that it is here, we weep for its defencelessness, its endangeredness, but, well, that’s how it is, they share the same anxiety, and in this common anxiety they sidle up to the walls, and they stare at the magnificent creations in Beilin, the Stele Forest, or, more elegantly phrased, the Grove of Stone Tablets. The entire complex is made up of many courtyards placed symmetrically around a central axis; the individual courtyards, however, are separated by fences, into which moon gates[53] have been placed to make them accessible to one another. The individual courtyards themselves are clearly ordered according to the same principle: that everything — the walls, the gates through which one passes from one courtyard to the next, the lawn and moss gardens, the bamboo and dwarf trees decoratively arranged, the pavilions and the columns of the corridors protecting the walls, the ridge-tiles on the roofs of the corridors — everything, including the plaster on the walls and how it is applied, everything must be regularly repeated as well as subordinated to a single goal according to which every element in Beilin must emphasize the reason for which it was created, that is, the 400 stone tablets — as they immediately find out from the director of the garden, a lanky, sympathetic youth with protruding eyes—400 stone tablets, protected with sheets of glass, enclosed in brown wooden frames and placed onto the white walls, that is, as the young man explains, one’s gaze — that of the esteemed guests — should be directed so that, wherever they happen to look, their gaze will rest unobstructedly on the inscriptions engraved on the steles, and they do rest there, that is what they experience, they say to the young man with recognition, then they sidle along the corridors of the square courtyards covered with tile, and happily discover — thanks to a certain knowledge of classical Chinese on the part of the interpreter — that here is the introduction Mi Fu wrote to the Orchid Pavilion,[54] as well as the inscription of Zhao Mengfu[55] and that of Su Shi,[56] and the words of Wei, the famous Taoist master, there are many renowned inscriptions here from all these authors, as the young man, coming again and again into view, reminds them, but then he mentions just one, and he takes them over to the stele, dating back 1,500 years, of Yi He Ming,[57] for which a special pavilion has been built, he shows them only this one — the garden, however, is filled with the masterpieces of classical Chinese calligraphy, built into the white walls outside along the corridors, and inside, within the vitrines of the various smaller pavilions, and they just wander from one courtyard and one pavilion into the other until they suddenly realize that they’ve been there for three hours, and for that entire time not one other person has set foot there, of course the weather is bad, they say consolingly to the young man, of course it’s about to rain, they finally bid him farewell by the exit where he has accompanied them: yes, he says, tianqibuhao, bad weather, yes, he waves goodbye with a single brief movement at the gate, with a wry expression, and says as they leave: jiuyao xiayu le, yes, it really looks as if it’s going start raining any moment now.