Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

“I’ve personally questioned a number of the criminals. The year before, there was a crackdown on hooligan offenders and one county arrested eight hundred of them. Most were sexually frustrated youths who didn’t deserve to be sentenced and certainly only a very small minority deserved the death sentence. Nevertheless large numbers were executed each time as stipulated in the directives from higher up. Even some of the clearer-thinking cadres in the public security bureau felt bad about it.”

“Did you defend them?” I asked.

He sat up and lit a cigarette.

“Tell the one about them dancing in the nude,” his woman friend prompted him.

“There’s this granary which used to belong to a production team on the outskirts of town. All the fields have now been divided up and the grain produced is stored in people’s homes, so it was empty and unused. Every Saturday, as soon as it got dark, a big group of youths from the cities and towns would come on their bikes and motorbikes. They would bring along a record player and go inside to dance. They had people guarding the door and the local peasants weren’t allowed in. The granary ventilators were very high so people couldn’t see in from the outside. The villagers were curious and one night some of them brought a ladder and climbed up. It was pitch-black inside. They couldn’t see a thing and could only hear music, so they reported it. The public security came out in force, raided the party and arrested over a hundred. They were all about twenty years of age, the sons and younger brothers of local cadres, young workers, petty merchants, shop assistants and unemployed youths. There were also a few adolescent boys and girls who were still at high school. Afterwards some were sentenced to prison and others to labour camps, quite a few were also executed.”

“Were they really dancing in the nude?” she asked.

“Some of them were, most were indulging in minor sexual activities. Of course some inside were having sex. One girl barely twenty years old said she had been penetrated more than two hundred times. She was really wild.”

“How did she manage to keep count?” It was still her asking.

“She said afterwards she became numb and simply counted. I have seen her and spoken with her.”

“Didn’t you ask her why she allowed this to happen?” I asked.

“She said at the beginning she was curious. Before going to the dance she had not had any sexual experiences but once the floodgates had opened there was no stopping. Those were her own words.”

“That’s quite true,” she said from under the quilt.

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“To look at her, you wouldn’t believe it, she was very ordinary. You would even think her face was rather homely, it was expressionless and had nothing wanton about it. Her head had been shaved and she was dressed in a prison uniform so you couldn’t tell what sort of a figure she had. Anyway, she wasn’t tall and she had a round face. And she didn’t baulk at talking about anything. She talked about whatever you asked her without any emotion.”

“Of course…” she said softly.

“Afterwards she was executed.”

All three of us fell silent.

“What was her crime?” I asked after quite some time.

“Her crime?” he asked himself. “A hooligan who incited others to crime. She didn’t go on her own but took other girls with her and of course these girls also ended up indulging in these activities.”

“The point is whether she had lured others into engaging in illicit sexual activities or had been an accomplice in rape,” I said.

“Strictly speaking, there was no rape. I saw the testimonies. However, as to her enticing others into engaging in illicit sexual activities, that’s hard to say.”

“Under those circumstances… it’s all very hard to say for sure,” she said.

“What about her motives? Not regarding herself, but for taking other girls along. What made her do this? Had someone asked her to do it or given her money to do it?”

“I asked her about this. She said she had only been intimate with men she knew and with whom she had eaten and had been drinking. She had never taken anyone’s money. She had a job, it seems, in a pharmacy or was in charge of drugs in some clinic, she was educated ..”

“This has nothing to do with education. She wasn’t a prostitute, it was just that she had a psychological problem,” she cut in.

“What psychological problem?” I turned to ask her.

“Why do you need to ask? You’re a writer. She was dissolute and wanted women around her also to be dissolute.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

“You understand perfectly well,” she retorted. “Everyone has sexual feelings, only she was unlucky. She must have loved some person but couldn’t have him. So she wanted revenge, first on herself…”

“Do you also want revenge?” the lawyer turned to ask her.

“If I got to that, I’d kill you first!”

“Are you as violent as that?” he asked.

“There’s violence in everyone,” I said.

“The question is whether it is a capital offence,” the lawyer said. “In my view, in principle only murder, arson and drug peddling should be treated as capital offences because these cause the deaths of others.”

“So you’re saying rape is not a criminal offence?” she got up to ask.

“I’m not saying rape is not a criminal offence. However soliciting for illicit sexual activities isn’t, because there are two consenting parties.”

“So do you think that enticing young girls into illicit sexual activities is not an offence?”

“That depends on how you define a young girl, if it’s an adolescent girl under eighteen years of age.”

“Do you mean to say that girls under eighteen don’t have sexual feelings?”

“Legally, there has to be a cut-off point.”

“I’m not concerned with the law.”

“But the law is concerned with you.”

“Why is it concerned with me? I haven’t committed any crimes, it’s you men who are the criminals.”

The lawyer and I burst out laughing.

“What are you laughing about?” She was targeting him.

“You’re worse than the law, are you even concerned about my laughing?” he turned and asked her instead.

She was unfussed about being only in her underwear and, hands on her hips, she glowered as she asked him, “Then tell the truth, have you ever been with prostitutes? Speak up!”

“No.”

“Tell the story about the hot soup noodles! Let him be the judge.”

“What’s there to tell, it was just a bowl of hot soup noodles.”

“Heaven only knows!” she yelled.

“What happened?” I was naturally curious.

“Money isn’t the only thing prostitutes want, they too are sensitive human beings.”

“Say whether or not you treated her to hot soup noodles,” she cut in.

“Yes, but I didn’t sleep with her.”

She scrunched up her lips.

He said it was a night when light rain was falling and there were very few people about. He saw a woman standing under a streetlight and went up to tease her. He didn’t think she would really follow him to the dumpling and noodle stall under a big oil-cloth umbrella. She said she wanted to have a bowl of hot soup noodles. He kept her company and each of them had a bowl, that was all the money he had on him at the time. He said he didn’t sleep with her but he knew she would have gone with him anywhere. He sat with her on some cement pipes for repairing gutters stacked on the side of the road and he put an arm around her as they chatted.

“Was she young and pretty?” she said giving me a wink.

“She was about twenty and had an upturned nose.”

“And were you really so virtuous?”