Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

She says she also misses her family, even her stepmother. Her father must be frantic and is certain to be looking for her everywhere. He’s getting old and if he’s not careful anxiety will affect his health.

She also misses her workmates in the laboratory. They’re petty, narrow-minded and jealous, but if anyone buys a fashionable dress they always take it off so everyone can try it on.

She also misses those troublesome dance parties but wearing new shoes and putting on perfume, the music and the lights still tug at her heart.

So what if the smell of antiseptic in the operating theatre was even stronger, still it is clean and orderly, and each medicine has a specified pigeonhole so that you can just reach out for it — all these are familiar and dear to her. She has to get away from this hellish place, all this talk about Lingshan is just to trick her!

She says it was you who said love is an illusion which people conjure up to delude themselves. You don’t believe in the existence of something called love — it’s either the man possessing the woman or else the woman possessing the man. And you just go on making up all sorts of beautiful children’s stories to provide a refuge for her weak and fragile soul. You say all this then straightaway forget that you’ve said it! You can deny you said any of this but the shadow you have left on her heart is indelible. She shouts out that she can’t go any further with you! The water at the bend looks calm but it’s bottomless, she can’t go any further with you towards that deep abyss. If you make a move she’ll cling onto you and drag you down with her so that you will go together to visit the King of Hell!

She says she can’t cling onto anything, it’s best that you give her a way to go on living. She won’t implicate you so you won’t be culpable, you’ll be able to travel comfortably, whether it’s to Lingshan or to Hell. There’s no need to push her, she’ll go away, far away from you, never see you again and never want to see you again. There’s no need for you to worry about her, it is she who is leaving so you will not have wronged her, there’ll be no remorse, no responsibility. Just treat it as if she hadn’t ever existed and your conscience won’t trouble you. You notice that you can’t utter a single sentence, this is because she has spoken about your sore spot, spoken about how you think. She has said for you exactly what you don’t dare say yourself.

She says she’ll go back, go back to him, back to that small room, back to her operating theatre, and back to her own home to restore her relationship with her stepmother. She was born an ordinary person and will return to being ordinary, and like an ordinary person marry an ordinary man. In any case she can’t go a step further with you, you monster, on your way down to Hell!

She says she’s afraid of you, you torment her, then of course she has also tormented you. Don’t say anything more, she doesn’t want to know anything, she knows everything, she already knows too much. It’s better to know nothing, she wants to completely forget all this, sooner or later she’ll have to forget it all. If finally there’s something she should say it would be that she’s grateful to you, grateful to you for the part of the journey you have taken her on and grateful for saving her from loneliness. However, she is even more lonely and it keeps getting worse and she can’t cope.

Eventually, she turns and walks off. You deliberately don’t look, you know she is waiting for you to turn your head. If you turn to look, she won’t leave, she will look at you, holding back her tears until they begin streaming down her cheeks. You will give in, beg her to stay. Then there will be embraces and kisses, she will again go limp in your arms, tearfully utter a jumble of endearing words, passionate and full of sadness. And with her arms like willow branches, her body will encircle you and drag you back down the same old road.

You resolutely refuse to look at her and go off on your own, straight along the precipitous river-bank. When you get to a bend you can’t help looking back, but she has vanished. Your heart is suddenly desolate, it’s as if you’ve lost something yet at the same time it’s as if you’ve attained some sort of release.

You sit on a rock as if waiting for her to come yet knowing she will not come back to you.

It is you who are cruel and not she and you simply think of her curses to convince yourself she is mean like this, so that she will totally vanish from your heart, so that you will not be left with any lingering remorse.

You drifted together like floating waterweeds, in that place Wuyizhen, because you were lonely and because she was depressed.

You don’t really know her at all, whether what she told you was truth or only half truth. Her inventions and your fabrications merge and are indistinguishable.

She also knows nothing about you. It was because she was a woman and you a man, because in the flickering light of the solitary lamp the dark upstairs room had the clean fragrance of paddy-rice straw, because it was a dream-like night in a strange place, because in the early chill of the autumn night she stirred your memories and your fantasies, your fantasies about her and your lust.

For her you were exactly the same.

Yes, you seduced her but she also seduced you. Is there need to attribute proportions of responsibility to a woman’s intrigue and a man’s lust?

But where will I find this Lingshan? There’s only that dumb rock where the mountain women go to pray for a son. Was she a zhuhuapo ? Or was she the young girl those boys took swimming at night? Anyway, she is not a young girl and you are certainly not a youth. While recalling your relationship with her you suddenly discover you can’t say what she looks like or how her voice sounded. It seems to be something you have experienced but even more so it seems to be wishful thinking. But where is the boundary between memory and wishful thinking? How can the two be separated? Which of the two is more real and how can this be determined?

Wasn’t it in some small town, a bus stop, a ferry crossing, a crossroad, on a roadside, that you encountered a young woman who aroused in you many daydreams? But by the time you return how will you be able to find any traces of her in that town, that bus stop, that ferry crossing, that crossroad or that roadside?

The Temple of the White Emperor, on a sheer cliff of the Yangtze River, is bathed in the rays of the setting sun. Whirlpools in the river below can be heard in the distance, and right ahead loom the two cliff walls of Kuimen, as straight as if chopped with a cleaver. Looking down from the iron railing the rippling crystal clear water of the smaller river divides the swift flowing muddy waters of the Yangtze.

On the far side of a little stream a woman with a mauve parasol is making her way through the shrubs and bushes on the mountain slope. She is on a track leading to the barren top of the rocky cliff, but it is hidden from view, and after a while she disappears.

I watch the brilliant gold of the setting sun disappear along the cliff tops and both sides of the gorge are suddenly plunged into darkness. Red navigation lights set on rocks close to the sides of the river appear, one after the other. An upstream steamboat heading east is crammed with passengers on all three decks as it enters the gorge, and the dull blast of its whistle reverberates long after it has gone.

It is said that at the fork in the river beyond Kuimen, Zhuge Liang heaped rocks for his Eight Trigram battle strategy. I have travelled by boat several times past Kuimen and people on board always eagerly point out the spot for me, but even now that I am in this ancient city of the White Emperor, I am still not sure of the location. It was in this ancient city that Liu Bei entrusted to Zhuge Liang his soon-to-be orphaned son who had been brought up to inherit the throne. But who can attest to the truth of storytellers’ tales?