Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

You feel you are walking in the river, under your feet are river weeds. You are submerged in the River of Forgetting, in tangled river weeds, and you seem to be anxious. At this moment, however, the despair of not belonging vanishes and your feet simply feel their way along the riverbed. You tread on smooth pebbles and curl your toes tightly around them. It is like sleepwalking in the darkness of the River of Death, it is only where the spray is churned up that there is a dark blue glow tinged with beads of quicksilver. You can’t help being amazed, and it is amazement tinged with joy.

Afterwards you hear heavy sighing. You think it is the river but gradually you make out that it is not one but several women who have drowned in the river. They are wretched, groaning, and their hair is bedraggled, and one by one they go past, their faces waxen and devoid of colour. There is a girl who killed herself by jumping into the river where the water gurgles in the holes at the roots of the trees, and her hair drifts with the flow of the current. The river threads through the dark forest which blocks out the sun and not a glimmer of sky is visible. The drowned, sighing women drift by but you do not think to rescue them, do not even think to rescue yourself.

You know you are wandering in the nether world, that life is not within your grasp. You are still breathing because of your bewilderment and life is suspended from one moment to the next of this bewilderment. If your feet slip, if the pebbles under your toes start rolling and in your next step you can’t touch the bottom, you too will drown in the River of Death like the floating corpses, and you will sigh with them. It is as simple as that, so there is no need to be especially cautious and you just keep walking. Silent river, black dead water. The leaves of low-hanging branches sweep the surface and there are lines of currents, like bed sheets which were snatched off by the current as they were being washed in the river, or like the pelts of so many dead wolves.

There is not a great deal of difference between you and wolves, you have suffered many disasters and you were bitten to death by other wolves. There is no logic to it all and there is no greater equality than in the River of Forgetting — the resting place for humans and wolves is ultimately death.

This realization brings you joy, you are so happy you want to shout. You shout but there is no sound, the only sound is the gurgling of the water as it strikes the holes at the roots of the trees in the river.

Where do the holes come from? The watery region is vast and boundless but it is not very deep and there are no banks. There is a saying that the sea of suffering is boundless, you are drifting in this sea of suffering.

You see a long string of reflections and hear a choir singing a dirge as if it were a hymn. The dirge isn’t sad but is happy. Life is joyous, death is joyous, it is nothing more than your memories. However, there are no choirs singing hymns amongst the images of your remote memories. Listening carefully, you find that the singing is coming from under the moss, thick soft undulating waves of moving moss which cover the earth. You lift it up to have a look and a squirming mass of maggots disperses. This disgusting sight fills you with wonder. You realize that these are maggots feeding off rotting corpses. Your body sooner or later too will be eaten up and this is not a particularly wonderful prospect.

I have been travelling for several days on this network of waterways with a couple of friends as my guides. We are doing whatever we feel like, walking several tens of li , going some distance by bus, taking a boat ride. It is by chance that we arrive in this town.

This new friend of mine is a lawyer and knows everything about the local conditions, customs, society and politics. He has his woman friend with him who speaks the gentle Suzhou dialect, and with the two of them as guides I am utterly relaxed touring these riverside towns. I, this drifter, am a celebrity in their eyes and they say that taking this trip with me gives them the chance to be carefree and happy. Each of them has family complications but, in the words of my lawyer friend, humans are basically free-flying birds so what harm is there in seeking some happiness?

He has only been a lawyer for two years. When this long-forgotten profession was resumed, he passed the entrance exams and quit his government job. He is determined to open his own legal office one day and claims that being in law is like being a writer. It is a profession with freedom. If one wants to defend someone one accepts the case so there is an element of choice. Unfortunately, at the moment he can’t defend me but, he says, when the legal system is stronger and I want to take my case to court I can certainly get him to represent me. I say that my situation doesn’t amount to a court case: no money is involved, I have neither damaged a hair on anyone’s head nor anyone’s reputation, there is no theft or fraud, no drug peddling, and no rape. There is no point going to court and if I did I couldn’t win. He throws up his hands, he knows this and is just saying it anyway.

“Don’t rashly say you’ll do the impossible,” his woman friend says.

He looks at her, winks, and turns to ask me, “Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

“Don’t listen to him, he has lots of girlfriends,” she says.

“What’s wrong with saying you’re beautiful?”

She puts out her hand and pretends to hit him.

They pick a restaurant overlooking the street and treat me to dinner. It is ten o’clock at night when we finish. Four young men turn up, order a big bowl of liquor each and a spread of dishes and it looks as if they intend drinking deep into the night.

When we come downstairs, some of the shops and eateries on the street are still ablaze with lights and haven’t closed, the bustle of former times has returned to this town. After a full day, at this moment what is urgent is finding a clean hostel, having a wash, brewing a pot of tea, letting the weariness disssipate, relaxing, and having a bit of a chat either sitting up or lying down.

On the first day we visited a few old communal villages with buildings dating back to the Ming Dynasty, inspecting old opera stages, looking for ancestral temples, taking photos of old memorial archways, reading old inscriptions, visiting old people. We also went inside a number of temples which had been restored or built with funds raised by the villagers and even had our fortunes told while we were there. We spent the night on the outskirts of a small village with a family in a newly-built house. The owner was an old retired soldier who welcomed us as lodgers and even cooked us a meal. He sat and told us about the heroic events which occurred during his participation in the work of bandit extermination, then told us stories about the bandits of earlier times in the area. Afterwards, when he saw that we were tired, he took us upstairs, which wasn’t partitioned, spread out some fresh straw, brought in some bedding, and said if we wanted the lamp to be careful not to cause a fire. We didn’t need the lamp and let him take it downstairs with him, then lay down in the dark. The two of them went on talking as I drifted off to sleep.

The next night, with the stars overhead, we arrived at a county town. We knocked on the door of a small inn and got them to open up. There was only an old man on duty and no other lodgers. The doors of several rooms were open and the three of us each chose one. This lawyer friend of mine came to my room to chat and his woman friend said she was scared of staying in the empty room by herself. She picked an empty bed and got under the covers to listen to him and me raving on.

He had a lot of astonishing tales and they weren’t like the old soldier’s tales which had gone stale and lost their bite. As a lawyer he had access to verbal and written testimonies of cases and had even come in contact with some of the criminals. He livened up the stories as he told them, especially the sex crime cases. His woman friend, curled up like a cat under the quilt, kept interrupting to ask whether it was all true.