Gao Xingjian - One Man

"You devil, what brings you here?" he asked.

"It's really great that I've found you, but it's impossible to give you a one-word answer!" Baozi, king of the urchins in the alleys and lanes in those days, had now learned to sigh.

He unlocked the padlock and opened the door to his room. The retired old man next door also had his door open and poked out his head.

"He's a schoolmate from my old home down south."

Now that he, too, wore a red armband, he took no notice of the old bugger and stopped him with one sentence. The old man's face wrinkled up into a smile that exposed his sparse teeth as he chuckled approvingly before retreating into his room and closing the door.

"I escaped without a towel or toothbrush and have been posing as one of the hordes of students who have come to Beijing. Do you have something for me to eat? I haven't eaten properly for four days and nights. I've only got a handful of loose change and don't dare spend any of it. By pretending to be a student, I've been able to get a couple of steamed buns and a bit of thin gruel in hostels."

As soon as he came into the room, Baozi slapped on the table a few Mao-head banknotes and some coins he had taken out of his pockets. He went on to say, "I escaped through the window the day before I was to be denounced by the whole school. A sports teacher, denounced for feeling a student's breasts during gymnastics, was dragged out as a bad element and beaten to death by Red Guards."

Baozi's forehead was creased with anxiety and he looked utterly wretched. Where was that mischief-making devil that went around stripped to the waist in summer as a child? Baozi could tread water, swim under water, and stand upside down like a dragonfly with his feet sticking up above the surface. When he went off to the lake to learn to swim without telling his mother, he had this companion to bolster his courage. Baozi was two years older, more than a head taller, and when it came to fighting he was really tough, so if he ran into boys looking for a fight, as long as Baozi was tJiere, he was not afraid. It was unthinkable that this intrepid desperado would today travel so far to seek him out for protection. Baozi said that after graduating from teachers' college he was sent to teach language at a county school. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Party secretary used him as a scapegoat.

"I didn't compile the teaching material, so how could I know which essay was problematical? I'd told some anecdotes and stories to liven up the teaching and I was attacked for doing most of the talking in the classroom. Could language classes be taught without talking? I was locked in a classroom and guarded day and night by Red Guards. I've got a wife and a child, and if there was a tragic outcome, even if I wasn't killed but just maimed, how would my wife bring up a baby that was not even one month old? I got out through a window on the first floor and scaled down a drainpipe without any trouble. I did not go home, because I didn't want my wife implicated. The train was crammed with students all the way here and it was impossible for tickets to be inspected. I've come to lodge a grievance, you've got to help me find out whether a low-level teacher like me with the significance of a sesame seed, and not even a Party member, could possibly be a member of the black gang within the Party."

After dinner, he took Baozi to the reception office for the masses located on the street to the right of the west gate of Zhongnanhai. The gate was wide open and the whole place lit up. The main court-yard was teeming with people who were pushing and shoving, and they were moved along slowly by the crowd. In a shed in the middle of the courtyard, military officials with cap and lapel badges were sitting at rows of desks, listening and taking notes, as people from all over the country lodged complaints. Baozi stood on his toes as he strained to hear in between people's heads about the "thinking of the Party Center," but it was too noisy. As soon as people got to the desks, they started shouting to be heard as they struggled to ask questions. The receptionists gave brief, discreet, standard responses, and in some cases simply took notes and answered without even looking up. The two of them were pushed away before they got anywhere near the desks, and were pushed, helpless, all the way into the corridor downstairs.

Posters protesting against persecution and extracts of speeches by important officials covered the walls. The speeches of these Party Center leaders who had been newly appointed or had not yet fallen from power were full of malice and hidden meanings, and also contradicted one another. Baozi started to panic and asked if he had pen and paper with him. He told Baozi not to worry about copying it all down because he had collected lots of these notices as well as stenciled copies of speeches. When they got home, they could go through them carefully.

All the offices in the building were open and officials here were also dealing with complaints. It was not as crowded, but there were queues outside the doors. In one of the offices, a youth, holding an old army cap that was white from washing, wept loudly as he related his grievance; tears streamed down as he spoke in thick, almost incomprehensible Jiangxi or Hunan dialect. He was telling about a local massacre. Men and women, old people and even babies, had been herded onto the threshing square and, group after group, beaten to death with hoes, meat cleavers, and metal-tipped carrying poles. The corpses were thrown into the river, and there was a terrible stench. The youth, almost certainly a descendant of one of the Five Black Categories, clutched the old army cap as his credential, otherwise he would not have dared come to the capital to report this grievance. The people crammed inside and outside the door of the office listened in silence as an official took notes.

After leaving the reception office and coming onto Chang'an Avenue, Baozi wanted to go to the Ministry of Education to see if there were directives for middle-school teachers. The Ministry of Education was located in the west of the city, just a few stops away, but blocking the road at the bus stop were schoolchildren from out of town, each carrying a school bag with an embroidered five-point red star. When the bus arrived, even before it came to a stop, they started surging on. The bus had already been full, so those getting off and those getting on had to grapple with one another. The doors unable to close, the bus started to move off with people caught in the doors. Although Baozi could scale drainpipes and jump out of buildings, he could not squeeze past these children who were as agile as monkeys.

They made their way by foot to the Ministry of Education. The whole of the building had been converted into a hostel for students from out of town. From the main hall downstairs to the corridors of every floor, all the offices had been vacated, and everywhere there were wheat stalks, grass mats, gray blankets, plastic sheeting, and disorderly rows of bedding. Enamel basins, bowls, chopsticks, and spoons were strewn all over the floors, and there was an all-pervasive stench of sweat, preserved radishes, shoes, and unwashed socks. Boisterous students with nowhere to go in the harsh winter cold had fallen fast asleep from exhaustion as soon as they lay down. They were all waiting for the Commander-in-Chief's seventh or eighth review the following day or the day after. There were around two million at each review, and youngsters started assembling in the middle of the night, first filling Tiananmen Square and then both sides of the square for ten kilometers from east to west along Chang'an Avenue. The Commander-in-Chief, accompanied by Deputy Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao holding his little red book of Mao's Sayings, would drive in an open jeep past walls of frozen students, many layers deep on both sides. These youngsters, waving the precious little red book, hot tears streaming down their faces, screamed themselves hoarse, wildly shouting "long live" to wish a long life to Chairman Mao. Then, fired with revolutionary zeal, they all went home to smash up everything that was old-wrecking schools, destroying temples, and attacking workplaces.