Gao Xingjian - One Man

"This was your instruction, you yourself gave the instruction: 'Historical problems have to be linked to actual behavior and need to be thoroughly investigated.' Did you or did you not say this?" this comrade kept at him relentlessly.

"Yes, yes." The old man was learning to be clever.

"Who is anti-Party? It is you who have betrayed the Party! Write all that down!" this comrade shouted harshly at him.

"What do you want me to write?" the old man asked, looking forlorn.

"Do you need a secretary to write it?" another comrade asked scornfully.

Everyone started laughing and talking all at once. They were excited, it was as if they had caught a big fish. The old man looked up a little, his face ashen. His slack, colorless lower lip began to tremble as he spoke.

"I… I've got a heart problem… Could I have a drink of water?"

He shoved a glass of water on the table to him. The old man took a small medicine bottle out of his pocket, tipped out a pill with his shaking hands, and swallowed it with a gulp of water.

It flashed through his mind that the old scoundrel was older than his own father… Hey! Don't you have a heart attack and drop dead here. He said, "Sit down and drink up all the water. If you need to, you can lie down on the sofa for a while."

The old man didn't dare go to the sofa where people were sitting, and looked miserably at him.

He gave up the idea and made a decision, "Now listen, first thing in the morning, bring a detailed account of your capitulation, and of your betrayal of the Party. Outline, clearly and in full, how you were arrested, how you got out of prison, who were the witnesses, and what confessions you made in prison."

"Ai, ai." The old scoundrel immediately bowed and nodded.

"You may leave now."

As soon as the old man went out the door, his comrades, who were all fired up for action, turned on him.

However, he was a slick talker, and just as mean. "Do you think he can get away with all this evidence against him? The heavenly net of the dictatorship of the proletariat won't let him escape! Don't let the old bastard have a heart attack and drop dead right in front of us."

"What if he goes home and commits suicide?" someone asked.

"I doubt that he would have the courage. If he wasn't afraid of dying, he would not have capitulated back then. He'll deliver his confession tomorrow without fail. What do all of you think?"

His comrades were speechless. He thoroughly detested the old bastard who spouted the Party line every time he spoke. But he felt sorry for him now that his own faith in revolution had been destroyed and he had dispensed with the myths that the perfect new people and the glorious revolution had created. The old scoundrel had concealed the matter of his capitulation by using a former pen name as his real name. By doing this, he had evaded successive investigations, yet he must have spent all these years in trepidation, he thought.

Can't a person's faith change? Once aboard the Party ship, does it have to be for the whole of a person's life? Is it possible not to be a loyal subject of the Party? Then what if one has no faith? By jumping out of the rigid choice of being either one or the other, you will be without an ideology, but will you be allowed to exist? When your mother gave birth to you, you did not have an ideology. You, the last in a generation of a doomed family, can't you live outside ideology? Is not to be revolutionary the same as counterrevolutionary? Is not to be a hatchet man for the revolution the same as being a victim of the revolution? If you don't die for the revolution, will you still have the right to exist? And how will you be able to escape from the shadow of revolution?

Amen. You were born with sin and unqualified to be a judge, but, cynically and for your own self-protection, you infiltrated the rebel ranks. At this very time, you are even more certain of this. It is also to find a refuge that, on the pretext of investigating Party cadres, you get a wad of letters of introduction stamped with official seals, draw a sum of money for expenses, and go off wandering everywhere. There's no harm in getting to learn a bit about this inexplicable world and seeing if there's anywhere to escape this catastrophic revolution.

On the southern bank of the Yellow River, in the city of Ji'nan, he found a small workshop on an ancient street. The person he was investigating had been released from a prison farm. The middle-aged woman supervisor wearing sleeve protectors was pasting up paper boxes. She replied, "The person's been gone a long time."

"Is he dead?" he said.

"If he's gone, of course he's dead."

"How did he die?"

"Go and ask his family!"

"Is his family still here? Who are they?"

"Who, in fact, are you investigating?" the woman asked back.

He couldn't say to some woman worker in a workshop that opened onto the street that the dead person and the cadre under investigation had been classmates at university and had joined the student movement of the underground Party organization, and afterward they had been in a Nationalist prison together. Also, there was no point in wearing himself out trying to explain all this cast-iron revolutionary logic. But he did have to get hold of a document saying that the person was dead, so that he could claim his travel expenses.

"Would you be able to put your seal on it?" he asked.

"Put my seal on what?"

"A testimony that the person's dead."

"You'll have to go to the public security supply office. We don't issue death certificates."

"All right. Which way do I have to go to get to the Yellow River?" he asked, imitating the woman's Shandong accent.

"What Yellow River?" the woman asked.

"Our China has only one Yellow River. Isn't your Ji'nan city on the bank of the Yellow River?"

"What are you talking about! What's to see there? I've never been there."

The woman went back to pasting her paper boxes and ignored him.

There was a saying that a person should not give up before reaching the Yellow River, and he suddenly thought of going to see it. The Yellow River had been eulogized from ancient times, and he had passed over it many times, but always in a train, and its greatness could not be seen as it flashed by through the metal framework of the bridge. A passer-by on the street told him that the Yellow River was a long way off, he would have to take a bus to Luokouzhen, then walk up the high embankment. It was only from the top of the embankment that the river could be seen.

When he climbed to the top of the high embankment of bare loess, there was no sign of anything green. On the other shore was a dusty flood area without any villages and not a single shrub. A rolling sludge lay below the fractures and slopes formed by silting at different water levels. The riverbed was high above the town. Was this fast-flowing, brown, muddy river the Yellow River that had been praised in songs over the ages? Did the ancient civilization of China originate here?

Below the horizon, as far as the eye could see, was the muddy river speckled with dazzling sunlight. But for the black shadow of a boat floating in the distance under the sun, there was absolutely no sign of life. Had the people who had sung its praises ever actually come to the Yellow River? Or had they simply made it all up?

That distant shadow against the sky, the sailing boat with a wooden mast, swayed as it neared. The gray-white sail had big patches, and a man, stripped to the waist, was holding the rudder. A woman in a gray jacket was also on the deck, throwing something overboard. The rocks in the cabin, which filled half of the boat, were probably used for mending breaks in the embankment during seasonal flooding.

He went down to the shore. It gradually became slushy mud, so he took off his shoes and socks and held them as he walked barefoot in the slippery quagmire. He bent down and scooped a handful of mud that dried in the sun into the shape of a shell. A revolutionary poet once sang: "I drink the water of the Yellow River." But this muddy soup was not for humans, and even fish and shrimp would find it hard to survive in it. It would seem that dire poverty and disaster can be eulogized. This great muddy river, which was virtually dead, shocked him and filled him with desolation. Some years later, an important member of the Party Center said he wanted to erect a great statue to honor the spirit of the nation in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and probably it has already been erected.