Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

“I was frightened she might have been unclean and had some disease.”

“You men are just like that!” She angrily lay down.

He said he really felt sorry for the woman, her clothing was thin and wet through. It was raining and quite cold.

“I can believe all that. Apart from being violent, people also have something compassionate in them,” I said. “Otherwise how would they be human?”

“This is all external to the law,” he said, “but if according to the law having sexual urges is criminal then all human beings are guilty!”

At this she gave a soft sigh.

We leave the restaurant, walk halfway down the road and come to an arched stone bridge, but do not see any inns. There is only one dim light on the river-bank at one end of the bridge. After our eyes get used to the dark we discover there is a line of black canopy boats moored along the stone embankment.

Two women come across the stone bridge and walk past close to him and me.

“Look, those women are in that sort of work!” the lawyer’s woman friend grabs my arm and says quietly.

I hadn’t noticed and quickly turn, but only see the back of a head of well-combed shiny hair pinned back with a plastic floral clip of one of them, and the profile of the other who seems to be wearing makeup. Both women are short and fat.

My friend stares at them for a while and watches them slowly walking off into the distance.

“Their customers are mainly boat workers,” he says.

“Can you be sure?” What’s surprising is that nowadays it’s quite open, even in a small town like this. I know they hang around some railway stations and wharves in the big cities.

“You can pick them out straightaway,” his woman friend says. Women are born with sharper instincts.

“They’ve got a secret code, if you give the right signal there’s a deal. They’re from the nearby villages, out to make a bit of extra money at night,” he says.

“They saw me here. If it were just the two of you they would have taken the initiative to come and chat.”

“But they’ve got to have somewhere to go, do they go back with the women to the villages?” I ask.

“There’s sure to be a boat nearby or they could go with the men to an inn.”

“Do the inns openly engage in this sort of business?”

“They have arrangements. Haven’t you come across this on your travels?”

I then remember a woman trying to get to Beijing to file a lawsuit. She said she didn’t have the money for her train fare and I gave her one yuan , but I couldn’t say for sure if she was one of these.

“Hey, you’re supposed to be carrying out social surveys. All sorts of things are going on today.”

I apologize for not being much good at carrying out social surveys, I’m incompetent. I’m just a stray dog poking around everywhere. They think I’m funny and laugh.

“Come with me, I’ll show you a good time!”

He’s got an idea again and yells towards the river into the dark, “Hey, are there any takers?”

He jumps off the paved embankment onto a black canopy boat.

“What for?” a muffled voice comes from under the canopy.

“Do you take the boat out at night?”

“Where to?”

“The wharf at Xiaodangyang.” He’s quick to give the name of a place.

“How much are you offering?” A middle-aged man says, emerging from under the canopy.

“How much do you want?”

They bargain.

“Twenty yuan .”

“Ten.”

“Eighteen.”

“Ten.”

“Fifteen.”

“Ten.”

“For ten yuan , this boat’s not going.” The man goes back under the canopy and we hear a woman speaking in a low voice.

We look at one another, shake our heads, and can’t stop laughing.

“I can go to the wharf at Xiaodangyang,” someone says from quite a few boats away.

My friend motions the two of us to be quiet and shouts out, “We’ll go if it’s ten yuan .” He’s having a lot of fun.

“Go over there and wait, I’ll bring the boat over.”

He can really bargain. The outline of someone in a jacket appears, plying a punt-pole.

“What do you think of that? We’ll also save the cost of lodgings for the night. This is called drifting on a boat in the moonlight! Unfortunately there’s no moon, but we can’t be without something to drink.”

He gets the boatman to wait. The three of us run back to a little street in town to buy a bottle of Daqu liquor, a bag of brine-soaked broad beans and two candles, and gleefully jump onto the boat.

The boatman is a wizened old man. We open the canopy flap, jump in, feel around in the dark and sit cross-legged on the planks. My friend goes to light the candles with his cigarette lighter.

“You can’t light a fire on the boat,” the old man says in a wheezing voice.

“Why?” I think maybe it’s prohibited.

“You’ll set fire to the canopy,” the old man grumbles.

“Why would we want to set fire to your canopy?” the lawyer says. The wind keeps blowing out the flame of his lighter so he pulls the canopy flap tighter.

“Venerable elder, if we set fire to the canopy we’ll pay you for it.” His woman friend is even more cheerful squashed between him and me. We are all suddenly very lively.

“Don’t light a fire!” The old man puts down his pole and comes in to stop us.

“Do as he says, it’s even more fun going out on a boat in the dark,” I say.

The lawyer opens the bottle, stretches out his legs, and puts the big bag of beans on the bamboo mat on the floor of the boat. I am sitting opposite him, feet to feet, and the bottle passes back and forth. She is leaning on him and from time to time takes the bottle from him to have a sip. In the calm bay of the river only the creaking of the punt-pole and the sound of the splashing water can be heard.

“That guy was at it for sure.”

“He would have gone for an extra five yuan , it isn’t very much.”

“Just the price of a bowl of hot soup noodles!”

We are becoming mean.

“These rivers and lakes have been infested with opium and prostitution since ancient times, can they be effectively prohibited?” he says in the darkness. “The men and women here are all dissolute, can you slaughter them all? This is how the people spend their lives.”

The dark night sky opens fleetingly to expose the brilliance of the stars, then darkens again. At the tail end of the boat is the continual creaking of the punt-pole and, from time to time, the soft lapping of the river. The cold wind seeps in through the tightly closed canopy flap at the front and even the used chemical fertilizer plastic bags which serve as curtains to keep out the wind and rain.

Weariness assails us and the three of us curl up in the middle of the narrow cabin of the boat. The lawyer and I, one at each end, push ourselves to the sides and she squeezes in between the two of us. Women are like this, they always need warmth.

I vaguely know there are cultivated fields up from the embankments on both sides and that in places where there are no embankments there are reed marshes. After passing a series of inlets the boat enters a waterway with such a dense growth of reeds that a person could be killed and the corpse disposed of without leaving a trace. Anyway it is three to one, even if one is a woman, and the other party is an old man. It is all right to completely relax and fall asleep. She has already turned to her side. My heels are touching her spine and her buttocks are pressed against my thighs but I am past caring.

October on the rivers and lakes is the season when things ripen. Everywhere, heaving breasts and bright flashing eyes are to be seen. Her body has an unaffected feminine sensuousness which seductively draws you to her and to want to caress her. Cuddled in his arms she must have sensed the warmth of my body and she puts an arm on my thigh as if to comfort me, though I can’t tell if it is out of playfulness or kindness. Then I hear growling but on listening carefully it turns out to be a sort of groaning which is coming from the back of the boat. At first I want to complain but something compels me to listen. It is a mournful wail wafting on the chilly wind over the river into the still night air. It is the old man plying the punt-pole singing, he is totally engrossed and totally uninhibited. The sound isn’t coming from his mouth but from deep down in his throat and chest, it is a wail of accumulated sadness being released. At first it is a jumble but afterwards I gradually make out some of the words, but they are fragmented, his Wu dialect has a strong village accent. What I hear seems to be saying, your seventeenth younger sister and eighteenth paternal aunt… went away with a maternal uncle and had wretched existences… drifting… wandering… with nothing… became nuns… good scenery… I lose the thread and understand even less.