Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

“The policies of those times aren’t like they are today. It’s changed now and people are being urged to come back to the mainland to visit their relatives.” What else can I say?

“She was a young girl and although she was in high school at the time she couldn’t understand all this. She wrote about missing her father in her diary!”

“If this was seen and reported she would certainly have been sentenced,” I say. I am interested in knowing if there were certain changes when the girl’s infatuation with her father got mixed with lesbian love.

She starts talking about how, because of her family background, the girl couldn’t go to university but was selected by the Peking Opera Troupe as a trainee performer, how she was instantly a big hit when the lead woman performer was sick and they put her in as a temporary replacement, how the lead woman performer was jealous, how when the girl’s opera troupe went on tour the woman secretly read her diary and reported her, how when the opera troupe returned to the city the public security officials got her mother in for questioning, asked her to urge her daughter to confess and to hand over the diary, how the girl was afraid of the public security officials ransacking her home and had transferred the diary to her home. However she too was afraid of the public security officials coming in to search so she took the diary to the home of the girl’s maternal uncle. During questioning the mother testified that her daughter only ever went to her home and the home of her maternal uncle. The maternal uncle was summoned and, afraid of being implicated, handed over the diary. The public security officials then turned to the girl, who of course was terrified, and made a full confession. At first she was isolated in the opera troupe and not allowed to go home and then later she was indicted on the criminal charge of writing a reactionary diary and recklessly planning restorationist anti-revolutionary activities. She was put under arrest and imprisoned.

“Are you saying that everyone informed on her and exposed her, even her mother and uncle?” The crab is too strong, I can’t eat anymore and put it aside. My fingers are covered in crab meat and there’s nothing to wipe my hands on.

“We wrote confessions exposing her and put our thumb print to it. Even her uncle who was much older was so frightened he didn’t even dare to see me again. Her mother insisted it was I who had led her daughter astray, that it was I who had fed her those reactionary ideas, and she forbade me to enter her home again!”

“How did she die?” I am anxious to find out the outcome.

“Listen to what I’m saying—” she seems to be defending herself.

I am not judging. If this had happened to me at that time I wouldn’t necessarily have been more level-headed. As a child I had seen my mother pulling out the roll of land deeds from the bottom of my grandmother’s chest and burning them in the stove, and I saw this as destruction of criminal evidence. Fortunately no-one came to investigate. If at the time investigations had involved me, there is no doubt that I would have denounced my maternal grandmother who had bought me the spinning top and my mother who had raised me. It was the way things were in those times.

It isn’t just the strong-smelling crab marinated in brine which is disgusting, it’s also me. I can’t eat anything else and just kept drinking.

She suddenly starts sobbing and covers her face with her hands, and next she is wailing loudly.

I can’t comfort her with my hands covered in crab roe, so I ask, “May I use a towel?”

She points to the basin containing clean water on the rack behind the door. I wash my hands and it is only after I give her a rinsed hand towel that she stops crying. I detest this ugly woman and have no sympathy for her.

She says at the time she was confused. A year later she gradually recovered and made enquiries about the girl’s whereabouts, bought a whole lot of foodstuffs and went to visit her at the prison and the girl had been sentenced to ten years and didn’t want to see her. The girl accepted the things she had brought only after she said she wouldn’t marry and would work to support her after she had served out her sentence.

She says the happiest days in her life were those spent visiting her friend. They swapped diaries, spoke lovingly as if they were sisters, swore never to marry and always to be together. Who would be the husband? Who would be the wife? Of course she would be the wife. Together in bed they would tickle one another until they couldn’t stop laughing, she was happy just to hear the sound of her laughter. However I prefer to imagine the worst of her.

“Then why did you get married?” I ask.

“It was she who changed first,” she says. “Once when I went to see her, her face was swollen and she was very cold to me. I was puzzled and kept questioning her. Right at the end of visiting time, it was always twenty minutes each time, she told me to get married and not to come again. Only after I pressed her about it did she say she had someone. I asked her who it was and she said another prisoner! I did not see her again after that. I wrote her many letters but never got a reply, it was then that I got married.”

I want to say that she had harmed her, that her mother justifiably hated her, otherwise the girl would have loved normally, married normally, had children, and not have ended up like this.

“Do you have children?” I ask.

“I didn’t want any.”

A mean woman.

“I separated after less than a year, then we squabbled for about a year before going through a divorce. Since then I have lived alone, I hate men.”

“How did she die?” I change the subject.

“I heard that she tried to escape and was shot by the guards.”

I don’t want to hear anymore and just want her to quickly finish the story.

“Shall I reheat the soup?” She looks at me apprehensively.

“Don’t bother.” She shouldn’t have got me here, to give vent to her frustrations, eating this meal disgusts me.

She also tells me how she tried all means to seek out a fellow inmate who had been released after serving out her sentence, and found out that her friend had been caught passing notes to a male prisoner and deprived of going out into the open and of having visitors. She had also tried to escape but by that time she was already deranged and would often laugh and weep for no apparent reason. She says that later she found out the address of the male prisoner who had been released. When she arrived at his place there was a woman there and when she asked him about the girl’s circumstances, either because he was afraid of the woman being jealous or because he was quite callous, he said he didn’t know. They didn’t exchange ten sentences and she departed in a rage.

“Can you write this up?” she asks, her head bowed.

“I’ll have to see!” I eventually say.

She wants to take me back or let me ride her bicycle back but I flatly refuse. On the way, gusts of cool wind blow from the sea and it looks like rain. When I get back to my lodgings in the middle of the night I have an attack of vomiting and diarrhoea. I imagine the seafood wasn’t fresh.

They say along the sea coast that strange music with bells and drums can always be heard at night coming from this mountain — it is the Daoist priests and nuns holding their secret ceremonies. He and she witnessed one of these by accident and reported it as soon as they got back. However, if people go up the mountain during the day to look for the Daoist temple they can’t find it. As they recall, it was on a cliff facing the sea. He says it was almost at the peak. She disagrees, it was up a small path on a cliff facing the sea but it would be halfway up the mountain.